Development and Validation of a MobileNetV2 Convolutional Neural Network for Automated Diagnosis of Tomato Fungal Diseases in Northern Nigeria

Abstract

Accurate, field-deployable diagnostic tools are needed to close the diagnostic gap that limits fungicide targeting among smallholder tomato farmers in Northern Nigeria. This study developed and validated a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) for automated diagnosis of five major tomato fungal diseases plus three additional common conditions, trained on field-collected leaf images from Kano and Kaduna States. A MobileNetV2 architecture pre-trained on ImageNet was fine-tuned via transfer learning on more than 10,000 images across ten disease and health classes, using farm-level dataset splitting to prevent data leakage and five-fold cross-validation for model selection.

Code and data availability

The paper describes a field-collected tomato leaf image dataset (>10,000 images) and a fine-tuned MobileNetV2 model, but contains no data availability statement, repository deposit, or public URL for the dataset, images, code, or trained model/checkpoints. All URLs in the text are citations to prior work, not paper-own

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