Advances in Technology Innovation, vol. 8, no. 3, 2023, pp. 192-209 English language proofreader: Chih-Wen Teng An Improved MobileNet for Disease Detection on Tomato Leaves Hai Thanh Nguyen 1,* , Huong Hoang Luong 2 , Long Bao Huynh 2 , Bao Quoc Hoang Le 2 , Nhan Hieu Doan 2 , Duc Thien Dao Le 2 1 College of Information and Communication Technology, Can Tho University, Can Tho, Vietnam 2 Information Technology Department, FPT University, Can Tho, Vietnam Received 15 February 2023; received in revised form 02 April 2023; accepted 04 April 2023 DOI: https://doi.org/10.46604/aiti.2023.11568 Abstract Tomatoes are widely grown vegetables, and farmers face challenges in caring for them, particularly regarding plant diseases. The MobileNet architecture is renowned for its simplicity and compatibility with mobile devices. This study introduces MobileNet as a deep learning model to enhance disease detection efficiency in tomato plants. The model is evaluated on a dataset of 2,064 tomato leaf images, encompassing early blight, leaf spot, yellow curl, and healthy leaves. Results demonstrate promising accuracy, exceeding 0.980 for disease classification and 0.975 for distinguishing between diseases and healthy cases. Moreover, the proposed model outperforms existing approaches in terms of accuracy and training time for plant leaf disease detection. Keywords: plant diseases, transfer learning, fine-tuning, MobileNet, mobile devices 1. Introduction Nowadays, the research and application of automatic identification of plant diseases using leaves are fundamental to agricultural needs. Moreover, Hassan et al. [1] reported that early and accurate identification of crop diseases helps farmers to reduce some difficulties and risks and improve the productivity and quality of agricultural products. The tomato plant, one of the easiest fruits to grow, is suitable for many soil types. Additionally, tomatoes bring very high nutritional and economic value to human lives. Tomato contains many antioxidants and vitamins, essential for people's overall health. However, sometimes farmers also need help checking and determining if the tomato fruit quality is up to the standard or if the tomato plant is healthy or not because sometimes diseases of tomato plants usually manifest mainly on their leaves [2]. Moreover, insects and pests that attack tomato plants and produce numerous illnesses can stymie the production of this well-known crop. Therefore, farmers must first understand the illness to treat diseases on tomato leaves manually. They face many problems yearly as they try to raise their healthy harvests to keep the profits from farming and raising livestock. Bhagwat and Dandawate [3] mentioned some countries have a gross domestic product (GDP) of up to 25%. Insects and other harmful viruses damage production lines and slow them down to the point where they can no longer produce as much as they can. This is a big problem for the industry, especially farmers. Even though farmers use a variety of pesticides and insecticides to protect their tomato plants from disease, they frequently need to gain knowledge of the disease and how to prevent it. Excessive pesticide and insecticide usage endangers human health and life. Crop damage can result from incorrect disease diagnosis and applying too many or too few pesticides. In addition, the improper use of pesticides also seriously affects the surrounding soil and water environment and so on. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: nthai.cit@ctu.edu.vn