Tomato leaf disease recognition based on improved convolutional neural network with attention mechanism

Plant diseases are common factors restricting crop yield and quality. For individuals without training, it is still difficult to identify various diseases accurately because many leaf diseases are similar in colour, shape and other aspects. Requiring an expert diagnosis can cause delays and lead to increasing costs. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved convolutional neural network for recognition of tomato leaf diseases. The experimental dataset was from the publicly available dataset PlantVillage. Based on the original ResNet18 model, a new convolutional neural network, TomatoNet, was constructed by adding a squeeze-and-excitation module and modifying the classifier structure. The results show that the average recognition accuracy of the TomatoNet network is 99.63%, which is 0.53% higher than the ResNet18 network. In addition, the recognition accuracy improved from 88.97% to 98.35% after the improvement of the AlexNet network. Finally, the superiority of TomatoNet was verified by comparison with other advanced models. This experiment verifies the feasibility of a deep learning algorithm for plant leaf disease recognition, which can provide a more efficient and convenient solution for detecting plant leaf disease.