Vegetable disease detection using an improved YOLOv8 algorithm in the greenhouse plant environment

Abstract This study introduces YOLOv8n-vegetable, a model designed to address challenges related to imprecise detection of vegetable diseases in greenhouse plant environment using existing network models. The model incorporates several improvements and optimizations to enhance its effectiveness. Firstly, a novel C2fGhost module replaces partial C2f. with GhostConv based on Ghost lightweight convolution, reducing the model’s parameters and improving detection performance. Second, the Occlusion Perception Attention Module (OAM) is integrated into the Neck section to better preserve feature information after fusion, enhancing vegetable disease detection in greenhouse settings. To address challenges associated with detecting small-sized objects and the depletion of semantic knowledge due to varying scales, an additional layer for detecting small-sized objects is included. This layer improves the amalgamation of extensive and basic semantic knowledge, thereby enhancing overall detection accuracy. Finally, the HIoU boundary loss function is introduced, leading to improved convergence speed and regression accuracy. These improvement strategies were validated through experiments using a self-built vegetable disease detection dataset in a greenhouse environment. Multiple experimental comparisons have demonstrated the model's effectiveness, achieving the objectives of improving detection speed while maintaining accuracy and real-time detection capability. According to experimental findings, the enhanced model exhibited a 6.46% rise in mean average precision (mAP) over the original model on the self-built vegetable disease detection dataset under greenhouse conditions. Additionally, the parameter quantity and model size decreased by 0.16G and 0.21 MB, respectively. The proposed model demonstrates significant advancements over the original algorithm and exhibits strong competitiveness when compared with other advanced object detection models. The lightweight and fast detection of vegetable diseases offered by the proposed model presents promising applications in vegetable disease detection tasks.