A fast accurate fine-grain object detection model based on YOLOv4 deep neural network

Early identification and prevention of various plant diseases is a key feature of precision agriculture technology. This paper presents a high-performance real-time fine-grain object detection framework that addresses several obstacles in plant disease detection that hinders the performance of traditional methods, such as dense distribution, irregular morphology, multi-scale object classes, textural similarity. The proposed model is built on an improved version of the You Only Look Once (YOLOv4) algorithm. The modified network architecture maximizes both detection accuracy and speed by including the DenseNet in the backbone to optimize feature transfer and reuse; two new residual blocks in backbone and neck enhance feature extraction and reduce computing cost; the Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) enhances receptive field, and a modified Path Aggregation Network (PANet) preserves fine-grain localized information and improves feature fusion. Additionally, use of the Hard-Swish function as the primary activation improved the model’s accuracy due to better nonlinear feature extraction. The proposed model is tested in detecting four different diseases in tomato plants under various challenging environments. The model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art detection models in detection accuracy and speed. At a detection rate of 70.19 FPS, the proposed model obtained a precision value of 90.33%, F1-score of 93.64%, and a mean average precision (mAP) value of 96.29%. Current work provides an effective and efficient method for detecting different plant diseases in complex scenarios that can be extended to different fruit and crop detection, generic disease detection, and various automated agricultural detection processes.