An automatic plant leaf stoma detection method based on YOLOv5

Abstract

Abstract The stomata on the leaf surface are mainly responsible for the material exchange between the internal and external environments of the plant, a large number of methods have been proposed to automatically measure the distribution position and number of stomatal, but few methods could achieve both stomatal count and open/closed‐state judgment. Therefore, this study proposes an automatic detection method for leaf stomatal morphology analysis based on an attention mechanism and deep learning. In order to obtain more stomatal feature information and send it to the network for learning, the proposed method adds a coordinate attention (CA) mechanism to the YOLOV5 backbone part. At the same time, in order to avoid the overfitting of the model during the training process, the authors added the training trick of label smoothing. Finally, the detection ability of the proposed method for stomata is verified on the broad bean leaves stomata dataset. The experimental results show that our method achieves a detection accuracy of 0.934 and an mAP of 0.968. By comparing with other state‐of‐the‐art algorithms, the detection capability of our method has been significantly improved. The generalization of the model is verified on the wheat leaf stomatal dataset. The experimental results show that our method can achieve a detection accuracy of 0.894 and an mAP of 0.907.

Code and data availability

The paper's broad bean/wheat leaf stomata microscopy image dataset (951 broad bean + 160 wheat images with YOLO-format annotations) is openly deposited on Zenodo per the data availability statement. No code or trained model deposit is explicitly stated.