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ObjectiveWith the development of agricultural informatization, a large amount of information about agricultural diseases exists in the form of text. However, due to problems such as nested entities and confusion of entity types, traditional named entities recognition (NER) methods often face challenges of low accuracy when processing agricultural disease text. To address this issue, this study proposes a new agricultural disease NER method called RoFormer-PointerNet, which combines the RoFormer pre-trained model with the PointerNet baseline model. The aim of this method is to improve the accuracy of entity recognition in agricultural disease text, providing more accurate data support for intelligent analysis, early warning, and prevention of agricultural diseases.MethodsThis method first utilized the RoFormer pre-trained model to perform deep vectorization processing on the input agricultural disease text. This step was a crucial foundation for the subsequent entity extraction task. As an advanced natural language processing model, the RoFormer pre-trained model's unique rotational position embedding approach endowed it with powerful capabilities in capturing textual positional information. In agricultural disease text, due to the diversity of terminology and the existence of polysemy, traditional entity recognition methods often faced challenges in confusing entity types. However, through its unique positional embedding mechanism, the RoFormer model was able to incorporate more positional information into the vector representation, effectively enriching the feature information of words. This characteristic enabled the model to more accurately distinguish between different entity types in subsequent entity extraction tasks, reducing the possibility of type confusion. After completing the vectorization representation of the text, this study further emploied a pointer network for entity extraction. The pointer network was an advanced sequence labeling approach that utilizes head and tail pointers to annotate entities within sentences. This labeling method was more flexible compared to traditional sequence labeling methods as it was not restricted by fixed entity structures, enabling the accurate extraction of all types of entities within sentences, including complex entities with nested relationships. In agricultural disease text, entity extraction often faced the challenge of nesting, such as when multiple different entity types are nested within a single disease symptom description. By introducing the pointer network, this study effectively addressed this issue of entity nesting, improving the accuracy and completeness of entity extraction.Results and DiscussionsTo validate the performance of the RoFormer-PointerNet method, this study constructed an agricultural disease dataset, which comprised 2 867 annotated corpora and a total of 10 282 entities, including eight entity types such as disease names, crop names, disease characteristics, pathogens, infected areas, disease factors, prevention and control methods, and disease stages. In comparative experiments with other pre-trained models such as Word2Vec, BERT, and RoBERTa, RoFormer-PointerNet demonstrated superiority in model precision, recall, and F1-Score, achieving 87.49%, 85.76% and 86.62%, respectively. This result demonstrated the effectiveness of the RoFormer pre-trained model. Additionally, to verify the advantage of RoFormer-PointerNet in mitigating the issue of nested entities, this study compared it with the widely used bidirectional long short-term memory neural network (BiLSTM) and conditional random field (CRF) models combined with the RoFormer pre-trained model as decoding methods. RoFormer-PointerNet outperformed the RoFormer-BiLSTM, RoFormer-CRF, and RoFormer-BiLSTM-CRF models by 4.8%, 5.67% and 3.87%, respectively. The experimental results indicated that RoFormer-PointerNet significantly outperforms other models in entity recognition performance, confirming the effectiveness of the pointer network model in addressing nested entity issues. To validate the superiority of the RoFormer-PointerNet method in agricultural disease NER, a comparative experiment was conducted with eight mainstream NER models such as BiLSTM-CRF, BERT-BiLSTM-CRF, and W2NER. The experimental results showed that the RoFormer-PointerNet method achieved precision, recall, and F1-Score of 87.49%, 85.76% and 86.62%, respectively in the agricultural disease dataset, reaching the optimal level among similar methods. This result further verified the superior performance of the RoFormer-PointerNet method in agricultural disease NER tasks.ConclusionsThe agricultural disease NER method RoFormer-PointerNet, proposed in this study and based on the RoFormer pre-trained model, demonstrates significant advantages in addressing issues such as nested entities and type confusion during the entity extraction process. This method effectively identifies entities in Chinese agricultural disease texts, enhancing the accuracy of entity recognition and providing robust data support for intelligent analysis, early warning, and prevention of agricultural diseases. This research outcome holds significant importance for promoting the development of agricultural informatization and intelligence.

Disease severity grading is the primary decision-making basis for the amount of pesticide usage in vegetable disease prevention and control. Based on deep learning, this paper proposed an integrated framework, which automatically segments the target leaf and disease spots in cucumber images using different semantic segmentation networks and then calculates the area of disease spots and the target leaf for disease severity grading. Two independent datasets of leaves and lesions were constructed, which served as the training set for the first-stage diseased leaf segmentation and the second-stage lesion segmentation models. The leaf dataset contains 1140 images, and the lesion data set contains 405 images. The proposed TRNet was composed of a convolutional network and a Transformer network and achieved an accuracy of 93.94% by fusing local features and global features for leaf segmentation. In the second stage, U-Net (Resnet50 as the feature network) was used for lesion segmentation, and a Dice coefficient of 68.14% was obtained. After integrating TRNet and U-Net, a Dice coefficient of 68.83% was obtained. Overall, the two-stage segmentation network achieved an average accuracy of 94.49% and 94.43% in the severity grading of cucumber downy mildew and cucumber anthracnose, respectively. Compared with DUNet and BLSNet, the average accuracy of TUNet in cucumber downy mildew and cucumber anthracnose severity classification increased by 4.71% and 8.08%, respectively. The proposed model showed a strong capability in segmenting cucumber leaves and disease spots at the pixel level, providing a feasible method for evaluating the severity of cucumber downy mildew and anthracnose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The plant disease recognition model based on deep learning has shown good performance potential. However, high complexity and nonlinearity lead to the low transparency and poor interpretability of such models. These limitations greatly limit the deployment and application of such models in field scenarios. To solve the above problems, we propose a dense caption generative model, Veg DenseCap. This model takes vegetable leaf images as input and uses object detection technology to locate abnormal parts of the leaf and identify the disease results. More importantly, it can describe the disease features it sees in natural language, and users can judge whether the relevant features are semantically consistent with human cognition based on these descriptions. First of all, a dataset containing Chinese feature description statements for images of 10 leaf diseases involving two vegetables (cucumber and tomato) was established. Secondly, Faster R-CNN was used as a disease detector to extract visual features of diseases, and LSTM was used as a language generator to generate description statements for disease features. Finally, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and the Focal Loss function were employed to overcome the imbalance between positive and negative samples and the weak performance of Faster R-CNN in obtaining key features. According to the test results, the Intersection-over-Union (IoU) and Meteor joint evaluation index of Veg-DenseCap achieved a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 88.0% on the dense captioning dataset of vegetable leaf disease images, which is 9.1% higher than that of the classical FCLN model. The automatically generated description statements are characterized by advantages of accurate feature description, correct grammar, and high diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to identify and avoid risks during the breeding process of laying hens, it is necessary to acquire real-time and continuous data of laying hens' physiology and production parameters. At present, data acquisition and processing is mainly dependent on the manual mode, which is a very costly and time consuming process. Meanwhile, the data obtained from human observation involves strong subjectivity, which could be disadvantageous for carrying out accurate, stable, and continuous recording. In addition, the manual mode of data measurement will affect the living environment and physiological state of laying hens, and even cause stress reactions. This will, in turn, affect the accuracy of data monitoring. Therefore, if there is an approach to collect all kinds of physiology and production parameters of laying hens in the natural state, the acquired data will be more accurate and closer to the actual situation of the testing objects. On the basis of previous studies, this paper proposes an automatic data monitoring system for laying hens' production parameters based on the sensor network technology. This system can collect 6 types of production parameters by using a multiple-sensor module, including food intake, water intake, excretion volume, egg production time, egg quantity, and egg quality. After an information integration process using a microprocessor, the acquired data will be transmitted back to the server end through the network. Thus, the remote data acquisition and the visualized data processing are realized under natural conditions. The author adopted the design method of man-machine engineering, and organically combined traditional cages with a sensor system. This new structure design ensures that each cage only holds one laying hen, and each hen has its own feed tank, water tank, egg collection plate, and excretion collection plate. The system therefore enables data acquisition of individual laying hens. The cages are built in modules, which is friendly for scale production, transportation, installation, and customization. In terms of data communication, this system applies the transmitter technology and expands the node access quantity of the RS 485 bus. The number of laying hens that can be simultaneously monitored on a single bus is up to 500. The data acquisition server reads the measurements of each sensor periodically by using the polling method. This paper discusses the factors influencing of the polling cycle, and provides a formula to determine its appropriate value. The paper also elaborates on the communication process between server and sensor, and describes the working principles of the sensors for food intake, water intake, excretion volume, egg production time, egg quantity, and egg quality respectively. Then data processing results are visualized in a variety of forms and tables. The results indicated that this system operates stably; the average relative error of food intake, water intake, excretion volume, and egg quality is below 0.2%. This study significantly improves the accuracy of data monitoring, and provides a new method and approach for the acquisition and analysis of scientific data. It also establishes meaningful references for the further research of automatic and interference-free data acquisition technology of laying hens during the breeding process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]