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Apple leaf diseases are one of the most important factors that reduce apple quality and yield. The object detection technology based on deep learning can detect diseases in a timely manner and help automate disease control, thereby reducing economic losses. In the natural environment, tiny apple leaf disease targets (a resolution is less than 32 × 32 pixel2) are easily overlooked. To address the problems of complex background interference, difficult detection of tiny targets and biased detection of prediction boxes that exist in standard detectors, in this paper, we constructed a tiny target dataset TTALDD-4 containing four types of diseases, which include Alternaria leaf spot, Frogeye leaf spot, Grey spot and Rust, and proposed the HSSNet detector based on the YOLOv7-tiny benchmark for professional detection of apple leaf disease tiny targets. Firstly, the H-SimAM attention mechanism is proposed to focus on the foreground lesions in the complex background of the image. Secondly, SP-BiFormer Block is proposed to enhance the ability of the model to perceive tiny targets of leaf diseases. Finally, we use the SIOU loss to improve the case of prediction box bias. The experimental results show that HSSNet achieves 85.04% mAP (mean average precision), 67.53% AR (average recall), and 83 FPS (frames per second). Compared with other standard detectors, HSSNet maintains high real-time detection speed with higher detection accuracy. This provides a reference for the automated control of apple leaf diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive research suggested that the core of how to use pesticides scientifically is the careful and accurate determination of the severity of crop diseases. The existing grading standards of plant leaf diseases have been excessively singular. Thus, the diseases roughly fall into general and severe grades. To address the above problems, this study considered the effect of the distribution of disease spots, and two evaluation indicators (termed the imbalance degree and main vein distance) were newly added to optimize the grading criteria of apple leaf diseases. Combined with other factors, the grade evaluation indicator was determined through PCA principal component analysis. A gradual multivariate logistic regression algorithm was proposed to evaluate apple leaf disease grade and an optimized apple leaf disease grade evaluation model was built through PCA-logistic regression analysis. In addition, three common apple leaf diseases with a total of 4500 pictures (i.e., black rot, scab, and rust) were selected from several open-source datasets as the subjects of this paper. The object detection algorithm was then used to verify the effectiveness of the new model. As indicated by the results, it can be seen from the loss curve that the loss rate reaches a stable range of around 70 at the epoch. Compared with Faster R-CNN, the average accuracy of Mask R-CNN for the type and grade recognition of apple leaf disease was optimized by 4.91%, and the average recall rate was increased by 5.19%. The average accuracy of the optimized apple leaf disease grade evaluation model was 90.12%, marking an overall increase of 20.48%. Thus, the effectiveness of the new model was confirmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alternaria leaf blotch, and rust are two common types of apple leaf diseases that severely affect apple yield. A timely and effective detection of apple leaf diseases is crucial for ensuring the healthy development of the apple industry. In general, these diseases are inspected by experienced experts one by one. This is a time-consuming task with unstable precision. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a LOW-COST, STABLE, HIGH precision apple leaf diseases identification method. This is achieved by employing MobileNet model. Firstly, comparing with general deep learning model, it is a LOW-COST model because it can be easily deployed on mobile devices. Secondly, instead of experienced experts, everyone can finish the apple leaf diseases inspection STABLELY by the help of our algorithm. Thirdly, the precision of MobileNet is nearly the same with existing complicated deep learning models. Finally, in order to demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method, several experiments have been carried out for apple leaf diseases identification. We have compared the efficiency and precision with the famous CNN models: i.e. ResNet152 and InceptionV3. Here, the apple disease datasets (including classes: Alternaria leaf blotch and rust leaf) were collected by the agriculture experts in Shaanxi Province, China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient identification of apple leaf diseases (ALDs) can reduce the use of pesticides and increase the quality of apple fruit, which is of significance to smart agriculture. However, existing research into identifying ALDs lacks models/methods that satisfy efficient identification in the wild environment, hindering the application of smart agriculture in the apple industry. Therefore, this paper explores an ACCURATE, LIGHTWEIGHT, and ROBUST convolutional neural network (CNN) called EfficientNet-MG, improving the conventional EfficientNet network by the multistage feature fusion (MSFF) method and gaussian error linear unit (GELU) activation function. The shallow and deep convolutional layers usually contain detailed and semantic information, respectively, but conventional EfficientNets do not fully utilize the different stage convolutional layers. Thus, MSFF was adopted to improve the semantic representation capacity of the last layer of features, and GELU was used to adapt to complicated tasks. Further, a comprehensive ALD dataset called AppleLeaf9 was constructed for the wild environment. The experimental results show that EfficientNet-MG achieves a higher accuracy (99.11%) and fewer parameters (8.42 M) than the five classical CNN models, thus proving that EfficientNet-MG achieves more competitive results on ALD identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a deep learning enabled object detection model for multi-class plant disease has been proposed based on a state-of-the-art computer vision algorithm. While most existing models are limited to disease detection on a large scale, the current model addresses the accurate detection of fine-grained, multi-scale early disease detection. The proposed model has been improved to optimize for both detection speed and accuracy and applied to multi-class apple plant disease detection in the real environment. The mean average precision (mAP) and F1-score of the detection model reached up to 91.2% and 95.9%, respectively, at a detection rate of 56.9 FPS. The overall detection result demonstrates that the current algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art detection model with a 9.05% increase in precision and 7.6% increase in F1-score. The proposed model can be employed as an effective and efficient method to detect different apple plant diseases under complex orchard scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apple plays a vitally important role in human life and is considered one of the most nutritious fruits. However, the quality and production of the apple industry are seriously restricted by apple leaf diseases and the disease lesions are hard to detect because they often have various scales and deformable geometry. To solve the above problem, this paper proposed a novel Multi-scale Constrained Deformable Convolution Network(MCDCNet), which takes advantage of multi-branch convolution and deformable convolution. Firstly, the novel two-branch convolution network is presented to enhance the discriminatory ability of models for extracting different scales of apple leaf disease. Secondly, different offset intervals are applied to the two kernels of the dual convolution channel separately, which makes the proposed model pay more attention to the deformable geometry features of the lesions and avoid extra weight parameters. Finally, a feature fusion module is constructed to achieve automatic detection of multi-scale apple leaf disease, which combines the output features from the dual convolution channels and performs dimensional operations on the channel dimensions of the feature map. Under the complex natural environment, the accuracy value of the proposed model can reach 66.8%, which is an improvement of 3.85% compared to the existing SOTA models. The experiment results established that MCDCNet has a better feature extraction capability and can efficiently and accurately detect 5 common apple leaf diseases in the natural environment. • The proposed MCDCNet can extract more reliable features of apple leaf diseases with various scales and geometry which effectively improve the discriminative ability of the network. • A novel Dual-constrained deformable convolution module is proposed to help the network get flexible receptive fields and help network dealing with apple leaf disease with various geometry and size. • A novel Feature fusion module is proposed to fuse outputs from dual branches which helps the MCDCNet automatically selecting appreciate geometry and scales of apple leaf disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apple leaf diseases seriously affect the sustainable production of apple fruit. Early infection monitoring of apple leaves and timely disease control measures are the key to ensuring the regular growth of apple fruits and achieving a high-efficiency economy. Consequently, disease detection schemes based on computer vision can compensate for the shortcomings of traditional disease detection methods that are inaccurate and time-consuming. Nowadays, to solve the limitations ranging from complex background environments to dense and small characteristics of apple leaf diseases, an improved Faster region-based convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN) method was proposed. The advanced Res2Net and feature pyramid network architecture were introduced as the feature extraction network for extracting reliable and multi-dimensional features. Furthermore, RoIAlign was also employed to replace RoIPool so that accurate candidate regions will be produced to address the object location. Moreover, soft non-maximum suppression was applied for precise detection performance of apple leaf disease when making inferences to the images. The improved Faster R-CNN structure behaves effectively in the annotated apple leaf disease dataset with an accuracy of 63.1% average precision, which is higher than other object detection methods. The experiments proved that our improved Faster R-CNN method provides a highly precise apple leaf disease recognition method that could be used in real agricultural practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apple leaf diseases are one of the most important factors that reduce apple quality and yield. The object detection technology based on deep learning can detect diseases in a timely manner and help automate disease control, thereby reducing economic losses. In the natural environment, tiny apple leaf disease targets (a resolution is less than 32 × 32 pixel2) are easily overlooked. To address the problems of complex background interference, difficult detection of tiny targets and biased detection of prediction boxes that exist in standard detectors, in this paper, we constructed a tiny target dataset TTALDD-4 containing four types of diseases, which include Alternaria leaf spot, Frogeye leaf spot, Grey spot and Rust, and proposed the HSSNet detector based on the YOLOv7-tiny benchmark for professional detection of apple leaf disease tiny targets. Firstly, the H-SimAM attention mechanism is proposed to focus on the foreground lesions in the complex background of the image. Secondly, SP-BiFormer Block is proposed to enhance the ability of the model to perceive tiny targets of leaf diseases. Finally, we use the SIOU loss to improve the case of prediction box bias. The experimental results show that HSSNet achieves 85.04% mAP (mean average precision), 67.53% AR (average recall), and 83 FPS (frames per second). Compared with other standard detectors, HSSNet maintains high real-time detection speed with higher detection accuracy. This provides a reference for the automated control of apple leaf diseases.

Extensive research suggested that the core of how to use pesticides scientifically is the careful and accurate determination of the severity of crop diseases. The existing grading standards of plant leaf diseases have been excessively singular. Thus, the diseases roughly fall into general and severe grades. To address the above problems, this study considered the effect of the distribution of disease spots, and two evaluation indicators (termed the imbalance degree and main vein distance) were newly added to optimize the grading criteria of apple leaf diseases. Combined with other factors, the grade evaluation indicator was determined through PCA principal component analysis. A gradual multivariate logistic regression algorithm was proposed to evaluate apple leaf disease grade and an optimized apple leaf disease grade evaluation model was built through PCA-logistic regression analysis. In addition, three common apple leaf diseases with a total of 4500 pictures (i.e., black rot, scab, and rust) were selected from several open-source datasets as the subjects of this paper. The object detection algorithm was then used to verify the effectiveness of the new model. As indicated by the results, it can be seen from the loss curve that the loss rate reaches a stable range of around 70 at the epoch. Compared with Faster R-CNN, the average accuracy of Mask R-CNN for the type and grade recognition of apple leaf disease was optimized by 4.91%, and the average recall rate was increased by 5.19%. The average accuracy of the optimized apple leaf disease grade evaluation model was 90.12%, marking an overall increase of 20.48%. Thus, the effectiveness of the new model was confirmed.

Alternaria blotch, Brown spot, Mosaic, Grey spot, and Rust are 5 common apple leaf diseases that severely impact apple production and quality. At present, although many CNN methods have been proposed for apple leaf diseases, there are still lack of apple leaf disease detection models that can be applied on mobile devices, which limits their application in practical production. This paper proposes a light-weight CNN model that can be deployed on mobile devices to detect apple leaf diseases in real time. First, a dataset of apple leaf diseases composed of simple background images and complex background images, which is called AppleDisease5, is constructed via data augmentation technology and data annotation technology. Then a basic module called MEAN block(Mobile End AppleNet block) is proposed to increase the detection speed and reduce model's size by reconstructing the common 3 × 3 convolution. Meanwhile, the Apple-Inception module is built by introducing GoogLeNet's Inception module and replacing all 3 × 3 convolution kernels with MEAN block in Inception. Finally, a new apple leaf disease detection model, MEAN-SSD(Mobile End AppleNet based SSD algorithm), is built by using the MEAN block and Apple-Inception module. The experiment results show that MEAN-SSD can achieve the detection performance of 83.12% mAP and a speed of 12.53 FPS, which illustrates that the novel MEAN-SSD model can efficiently and accurately detect 5 common apple leaf diseases on mobile devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient identification of apple leaf diseases (ALDs) can reduce the use of pesticides and increase the quality of apple fruit, which is of significance to smart agriculture. However, existing research into identifying ALDs lacks models/methods that satisfy efficient identification in the wild environment, hindering the application of smart agriculture in the apple industry. Therefore, this paper explores an ACCURATE, LIGHTWEIGHT, and ROBUST convolutional neural network (CNN) called EfficientNet-MG, improving the conventional EfficientNet network by the multistage feature fusion (MSFF) method and gaussian error linear unit (GELU) activation function. The shallow and deep convolutional layers usually contain detailed and semantic information, respectively, but conventional EfficientNets do not fully utilize the different stage convolutional layers. Thus, MSFF was adopted to improve the semantic representation capacity of the last layer of features, and GELU was used to adapt to complicated tasks. Further, a comprehensive ALD dataset called AppleLeaf9 was constructed for the wild environment. The experimental results show that EfficientNet-MG achieves a higher accuracy (99.11%) and fewer parameters (8.42 M) than the five classical CNN models, thus proving that EfficientNet-MG achieves more competitive results on ALD identification.