MSFNet: A Multi-Source Fusion-Based Method with Enhanced Hierarchical Spectral Semantic Perception for Wheat Disease Region Classification

Wheat diseases threaten yield and food security, highlighting the need for rapid, accurate diagnosis in precision agriculture. However, current remote sensing methods often lack hierarchical spectral semantic perception or rely on single-source data and simple fusion, limiting diagnostic performance. To address these challenges, this study proposed MSFNet, a novel multi-source fusion network with enhanced hierarchical spectral semantic perception, to achieve the precise regional classification of wheat diseases. Specifically, a multi-source fusion module (MSFM) was developed, employing a dual-branch architecture to simultaneously enhance spatial–spectral semantics and comprehensively explore complementary cross-modal features, thereby enabling the effective integration of critical information from both modalities. Furthermore, a hierarchical spectral semantic fusion module (HSSFM) was developed, which employs a pyramid architecture integrated with attention mechanisms to fuse hierarchical spectral semantics, thereby significantly enhancing the model’s hierarchical feature representation capacity. To support this research, we constructed a new multispectral remote sensing dataset, MSWDD2024, tailored for wheat disease region diagnosis. Experimental evaluations on MSWDD2024 demonstrated that MSFNet achieved 95.4% accuracy, 95.6% precision, and 95.6% recall, surpassing ResNet18 by 6.0%, 6.0%, and 5.8%, respectively, and outperforming RGB-only models by over 12% across all metrics. Moreover, MSFNet consistently exceeded the performance of existing state-of-the-art methods. These results confirm the superior effectiveness of MSFNet in remote sensing-based wheat disease diagnosis, offering a promising solution for robust and accurate monitoring in precision agriculture.