Research on tomato disease image recognition method based on DeiT

Tomatoes, globally cultivated and economically significant, play an essential role in both commerce and diet. However, the frequent occurrence of diseases severely affects both yield and quality, posing substantial challenges to agricultural production worldwide. In China, where tomato cultivation is carried out on a large scale, disease prevention and identification are increasingly critical for enhancing yield, ensuring food safety, and advancing sustainable agricultural practices. As agricultural production scales and the demand for efficient methodologies grows, traditional disease recognition methods no longer meet current needs. The agricultural sector's move towards more modern and scalable production methods necessitates more effective and precise disease recognition technologies to support swift decision-making and timely preventive actions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel tomato disease recognition method that integrates the data-efficient image transformers (DeiT) model with strategies like exponential moving average (EMA) and self-distillation, named EMA-DeiT. By leveraging deep learning technologies, this method significantly improves the accuracy of disease recognition. The enhanced EMA-DeiT model demonstrated exemplary performance, achieving a 99.6 % accuracy rate in identifying ten types of tomato leaf diseases within the PlantVillage public dataset and 98.2 % on the Dataset of Tomato Leaves, which encompasses six disease types. In generalization tests, it achieved 97.1 % accuracy on the PlantDoc dataset and 97.6 % on the Tomato-Village dataset. Utilizing the improved DeiT model, a comprehensive tomato disease recognition system was developed, featuring modules for image collection, disease detection, and information display. This system facilitates an integrated process from image collection to intelligent disease analysis, enabling agricultural workers to promptly understand and respond to disease occurrences. This system holds significant practical value for implementing precision agriculture and enhancing the efficiency of agricultural production.