Deep Learning-Based Object Detection Improvement for Tomato Disease

To improve the recognition model accuracy of crop disease leaves and locating diseased leaves, this paper proposes an improved Faster RCNN to detect healthy tomato leaves and four diseases: powdery mildew, blight, leaf mold fungus and ToMV. First, we use a depth residual network to replace VGG16 for image feature extraction so we can obtain deeper disease features. Second, the k-means clustering algorithm is used to cluster the bounding boxes. We improve the anchoring according to the clustering results. The improved anchor frame tends toward the real bounding box of the dataset. Finally, we carry out a k-means experiment with three kinds of different feature extraction networks. The experimental results show that the improved method for crop leaf disease detection had 2.71% higher recognition accuracy and a faster detection speed than the original Faster RCNN.