LightMixer: A novel lightweight convolutional neural network for tomato disease detection

Tomatoes are among the very important crops grown worldwide. However, tomato diseases can harm the health of tomato plants during growth and reduce tomato yields over large areas. The development of computer vision technology offers the prospect of solving this problem. However, traditional deep learning algorithms require a high computational cost and several parameters. Therefore, a lightweight tomato leaf disease identification model called LightMixer was designed in this study. The LightMixer model comprises a depth convolution with a Phish module and a light residual module. Depth convolution with the Phish module represents a lightweight convolution module designed to splice nonlinear activation functions with depth convolution as the backbone; it also focuses on lightweight convolutional feature extraction to facilitate deep feature fusion. The light residual module was built based on lightweight residual blocks to accelerate the computational efficiency of the entire network architecture and reduce the information loss of disease features. Experimental results show that the proposed LightMixer model achieved 99.3% accuracy on public datasets while requiring only 1.5 M parameters, an improvement over other classical convolutional neural network and lightweight models, and can be used for automatic tomato leaf disease identification on mobile devices.