Abstract
Tea disease detection is of great significance to the tea industry. In order to solve the problems such as mutual occlusion of leaves, light disturbance, and small lesion area under complex background, YOLO-SSM, a tea disease detection model, was proposed in this paper. The model introduces the SSPDConv convolution module in the backbone of YOLOv8 to enhance the global information perception of the model under complex backgrounds; a new ESPPFCSPC module is proposed to replace the original spatial pyramid pool SPPF module, which optimizes the multi-scale feature expression; and the MPDIoU loss function is introduced to optimize the problem that the original CIoU is insensitive to the change of target size, and the positioning ability of small targets is improved. Finally, the map values of 89.7% and 68.5% were obtained on a self-made tea data set and a public tea disease data set, which were improved by 3.9% and 4.3%, respectively, compared with the original benchmark model, and the reasoning speed of the model was 164.3 fps. Experimental results show that the proposed YOLO-SSM algorithm has obvious advantages in accuracy and model complexity and can provide reliable theoretical support for efficient and accurate detection and identification of tea leaf diseases in natural scenes.