DCCAM-MRNet: Mixed Residual Connection Network with Dilated Convolution and Coordinate Attention Mechanism for Tomato Disease Identification

Tomato is an important and fragile crop. During the course of its development, it is frequently contaminated with bacteria or viruses. Tomato leaf diseases may be detected quickly and accurately, resulting in increased productivity and quality. Because of the intricate development environment of tomatoes and their inconspicuous disease spot features and small spot area, present machine vision approaches fail to reliably recognize tomato leaves. As a result, this research proposes a novel paradigm for detecting tomato leaf disease. The INLM (integration nonlocal means) filtering algorithm, for example, decreases the interference of surrounding noise on the features. Then, utilizing ResNeXt50 as the backbone, we create DCCAM-MRNet, a novel tomato image recognition network. Dilated Convolution (DC) was employed in STAGE 1 of the DCCAM-MRNet to extend the network's perceptual area and locate the scattered disease spots on tomato leaves. The coordinate attention (CA) mechanism is then introduced to record cross-channel information and direction- and position-sensitive data, allowing the network to more accurately detect localized tomato disease spots. Finally, we offer a mixed residual connection (MRC) technique that combines residual block (RS-Block) and transformed residual block (TR-Block) (TRS-Block). This strategy can increase the network's accuracy while also reducing its size. The DCCAM-classification MRNet's accuracy is 94.3 percent, which is higher than the existing network, and the number of parameters is 0.11 M lesser than the backbone network ResNeXt50, according to the experimental results. As a result, combining INLM and DCCAM-MRNet to identify tomato diseases is a successful strategy.