[Objectives]Aiming at the difficulty of identifying pests and diseases in the real environment of bergamot in the field, this paper proposed a method for detecting pests and diseases of bergamot based on improved SSD(single shot MultiBox detector)algorithm—SSD-Res50-3C algorithm. [Methods]The backbone network partially replaced the original VGG16 network with the ResNet50 network, and enhanced the model's ability to extract the characteristics of pests and diseases of bergamot in the real background of the field. A lightweight and efficient feature fusion module was added before predicting the feature layer to improve the multi-scale feature fusion capability of the SSD algorithm, and further improved the anti-interference ability of the SSD algorithm in the real background of the field. [Results]The mean average precision of SSD-Res50-3C algorithm was 92.86%, which was 6.61% higher than that of the original SSD algorithm, and the FPS(frames per second)reached 64.1. Compared with YOLO v3, YOLO v4, YOLO v5x6, Faster R-CNN, and EfficientDet-D3 models, the mean average precision of SSD-Res50-3C algorithm was 6.41%, 2.01%, 0.79%, 0.58%, and 5.10%, respectively, and FPS was 16.20, 40.28, 24.40, 36.20, and 54.84, respectively. [Conclusions]The pests and diseases detection method of bergamot based on the improved SSD algorithm proposed in this paper could weaken the interference information of the real environment in the field, accurately identify the target of pests and diseases of bergamot in the real environment of the field, and provide a new idea for the detection of pests and diseases of bergamot in the real environment of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]