Early recognition of tomato gray leaf spot disease based on MobileNetv2-YOLOv3 model

Background Tomato gray leaf spot is a worldwide disease, especially in warm and humid areas. The continuous expansion of greenhouse tomato cultivation area and the frequent introduction of foreign varieties in recent years have increased the severity of the epidemic hazards of this disease in some tomato planting bases annually. This disease is a newly developed one. Thus, farmers generally lack prevention and control experience and measures in production; the disease is often misdiagnosed or not prevented and controlled timely; this condition results in tomato production reduction or crop failure, which causes severe economic losses to farmers. Therefore, tomato gray leaf spot disease should be identified in the early stage, which will be important in avoiding or reducing the economic loss caused by the disease. The advent of the era of big data has facilitated the use of machine learning method in disease identification. Therefore, deep learning method is proposed to realise the early recognition of tomato gray leaf spot. Tomato growers need to develop the app of image detection mobile terminal of tomato gray leaf spot disease to realise real-time detection of this disease. Results This study proposes an early recognition method of tomato leaf spot based on MobileNetv2-YOLOv3 model to achieve a good balance between the accuracy and real-time detection of tomato gray leaf spot. This method improves the accuracy of the regression box of tomato gray leaf spot recognition by introducing the GIoU bounding box regression loss function. A MobileNetv2-YOLOv3 lightweight network model, which uses MobileNetv2 as the backbone network of the model, is proposed to facilitate the migration to the mobile terminal. The pre-training method combining mixup training and transfer learning is used to improve the generalisation ability of the model. The images captured under four different conditions are statistically analysed. The recognition effect of the models is evaluated by the F1 score and the AP value, and the experiment is compared with Faster-RCNN and SSD models. Experimental results show that the recognition effect of the proposed model is significantly improved. In the test dataset of images captured under the background of sufficient light without leaf shelter, the F1 score and AP value are 94.13% and 92.53%, and the average IOU value is 89.92%. In all the test sets, the F1 score and AP value are 93.24% and 91.32%, and the average IOU value is 86.98%. The object detection speed can reach 246 frames/s on GPU, the extrapolation speed for a single 416 x 416 picture is 16.9 ms, the detection speed on CPU can reach 22 frames/s, the extrapolation speed is 80.9 ms and the memory occupied by the model is 28 MB. Conclusions The proposed recognition method has the advantages of low memory consumption, high recognition accuracy and fast recognition speed. This method is a new solution for the early prediction of tomato leaf spot and a new idea for the intelligent diagnosis of tomato leaf spot.