LSGNet: A lightweight convolutional neural network model for tomato disease identification

Abstract

Tomatoes are among the most extensively grown and consumed crops worldwide, but tomato production can be greatly reduced due to various diseases. Plant diseases show different symptoms at different stages. In addition, there are similarities in the symptoms of different types of plant diseases, which hinder the recognition of diseases by existing deep learning models. Traditional convolutional neural network (CNN) models for disease recognition have a large number of parameters that require high computational resources. To overcome these challenges, we propose a lightweight CNN model named LSGNet (lightweight sandglass network) for tomato disease identification. The LSGNet backbone consists of the sandglass with efficient channel attention (SGECA) and the position aware circular convolution sandglass (ParcSG) modules. The SGECA module reduces the interference of complex environments and thus focuses on extracting useful feature information. The ParcSG module has a global receptive field, which provides more detailed feature information on disease recognition. The results show that the recognition accuracies are 92.37%, 94.32%, 89.64%, 92.70%, 94.43%, 90.97%, 89.42%, 92.98%, 89.58%, and 95.54% for AlexNet, ResNet50, VGG16, MobileNetV3-Large, ShuffleNetV2-1 × , EfficientNetV2-Small, ViT-Base, MobileViT-Small, Swin-Tiny, and LSGNet. Therefore, LSGNet has higher accuracy in recognizing tomato diseases compared to other classical models. In addition, LSGNet uses 0.75 million parameters. Compared to the lightweight CNN model MobileNetV3-Large, it only has 18% of the parameters. As a whole, the advantages of LSGNet in efficiency and lightweight structure would make it a useful tool for tomato disease recognition on mobile or embedded devices.