An improved YOLOv5-based apple leaf disease detection method

Abstract The effective identification of fruit tree leaf disease is of great practical significance to reduce pesticide spraying, improve fruit yield and realize ecological agriculture. Computer vision technology can be effectively identifying and prevent plant diseases and insect pests. However, the lack of consideration of disease diversity and accuracy of existing detection models hinders their application and development in the field of plant pest detection. This paper proposes an efficient detection model of apple leaf disease spot through the improvement of the traditional Yolov5 detection network called A-Net. In order to significantly increase the A-Net's detection speed and accuracy, the A-Net model applies the loss function Wise-IoU, which includes the attention mechanism and the dynamic focusing mechanism, to the Yolov5 network model. The RepVGG module is then used to replace the original model's convolution module. The experimental results show that the improved model effectively suppresses the growth of some error weights. Compared with several object detection models, the improved A-Net model has a Mean Average Precision across IoU threshold 0.5 and an accuracy of 92.7%, which fully proves that the improved A-Net model has more advantages in detecting apple leaf diseases.