Fruits diseases classification: exploiting a hierarchical framework for deep features fusion and selection

A comprehensive cotton leaf disease dataset for enhanced detection and classification

The creation and use of a comprehensive cotton leaf disease dataset offer significant benefits in agricultural research, precision farming, and disease management. This dataset enables the development of accurate machine learning models for early disease detection, reducing manual inspections and facilitating timely interventions. It serves as a benchmark for testing algorithms and training deep learning models, aiding in automated monitoring and decision support tools in precision agriculture. This leads to targeted interventions, reduced chemical use, and improved crop management. Global collaboration is fostered, contributing to the development of disease-resistant cotton varieties and effective management strategies, ultimately reducing economic losses and promoting sustainable farming. Field surveys conducted from October 2023 to January 2024 ensured meticulous image capture under diverse conditions. The images are categorized into eight classes, representing specific disease manifestations, pests, or environmental stress in cotton plants. The dataset comprises 2137 original images and 7000 augmented images, enhancing deep learning model training. The Inception V3 model demonstrated high performance, with an overall accuracy of 96.03 %. This underscores the dataset's potential in advancing automated disease detection in cotton agriculture.

ERCP-Net: a channel extension residual structure and adaptive channel attention mechanism for plant leaf disease classification network

Plant leaf diseases are a major cause of plant mortality, especially in crops. Timely and accurately identifying disease types and implementing proper treatment measures in the early stages of leaf diseases are crucial for healthy plant growth. Traditional plant disease identification methods rely heavily on visual inspection by experts in plant pathology, which is time-consuming and requires a high level of expertise. So, this approach fails to gain widespread adoption. To overcome these challenges, we propose a channel extension residual structure and adaptive channel attention mechanism for plant leaf disease classification network (ERCP-Net). It consists of channel extension residual block (CER-Block), adaptive channel attention block (ACA-Block), and bidirectional information fusion block (BIF-Block). Meanwhile, an application for the real-time detection of plant leaf diseases is being created to assist precision agriculture in practical situations. Finally, experiments were conducted to compare our model with other state-of-the-art deep learning methods on the PlantVillage and AI Challenger 2018 datasets. Experimental results show that our model achieved an accuracy of 99.82% and 86.21%, respectively. Also, it demonstrates excellent robustness and scalability, highlighting its potential for practical implementation.

Computer vision-based plants phenotyping: A comprehensive survey

The increasing demand for food production due to the growing population is raising the need for more food-productive environments for plants. The genetic behavior of plant traits remains different in different growing environments. However, it is tedious and impossible to look after the individual plant component traits manually. Plant breeders need computer vision-based plant monitoring systems to analyze different plants' productivity and environmental suitability. It leads to performing feasible quantitative analysis, geometric analysis, and yield rate analysis of the plants. Many of the data collection methods have been used by plant breeders according to their needs. In the presented review, most of them are discussed with their corresponding challenges and limitations. Furthermore, the traditional approaches of segmentation and classification of plant phenotyping are also discussed. The data limitation problems and their currently adapted solutions in the computer vision aspect are highlighted, which somehow solve the problem but are not genuine. The available datasets and current issues are enlightened. The presented study covers the plants phenotyping problems, suggested solutions, and current challenges from data collection to classification steps.

Plant leaf infected spot segmentation using robust encoder-decoder cascaded deep learning model

Leaf infection detection and diagnosis at an earlier stage can improve agricultural output and reduce monetary costs. An inaccurate segmentation may degrade the accuracy of disease classification due to some different and complex leaf diseases. Also, the disease's adhesion and dimension can overlap, causing partial under-segmentation. Therefore, a novel robust Deep Encoder-Decoder Cascaded Network (DEDCNet) model is proposed in this manuscript for leaf image segmentation that precisely segments the diseased leaf spots and differentiates similar diseases. This model is comprised of an Infected Spot Recognition Network and an Infected Spot Segmentation Network. Initially, ISRN is designed by integrating cascaded CNN with a Feature Pyramid Pooling layer to identify the infected leaf spot and avoid an impact of background details. After that, the ISSN developed using an encoder-decoder network, which uses a multi-scale dilated convolution kernel to precisely segment the infected leaf spot. Moreover, the resultant leaf segments are provided to the pre-learned CNN models to learn texture features followed by the SVM algorithm to categorize leaf disease classes. The ODEDCNet delivers exceptional performance on both the Betel Leaf Image and PlantVillage datasets. On the Betel Leaf Image dataset, it achieves an accuracy of 94.89%, with high precision (94.35%), recall (94.77%), and F-score (94.56%), while maintaining low under-segmentation (6.2%) and over-segmentation rates (2.8%). It also achieves a remarkable Dice coefficient of 0.9822, all in just 0.10 seconds. On the PlantVillage dataset, the ODEDCNet outperforms other existing models with an accuracy of 96.5%, demonstrating high precision (96.61%), recall (96.5%), and F-score (96.56%). It excels in reducing under-segmentation to just 3.12% and over-segmentation to 2.56%. Furthermore, it achieves a Dice coefficient of 0.9834 in a mere 0.09 seconds. It evident for the greater efficiency on both segmentation and categorization of leaf diseases contrasted with the existing models.

A Block-Based and Highly Parallel CNN Accelerator for Seed Sorting

Seed sorting is critical for the breeding industry to improve the agricultural yield. The seed sorting methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved excellent recognition accuracy on large-scale pretrained network models. However, CNN inference is a computationally intensive process that often requires hardware acceleration to operate in real time. For embedded devices, the high-power consumption of graphics processing units (GPUs) is generally prohibitive, and the field programmable gate array (FPGA) becomes a solution to perform high-speed inference by providing a customized accelerator for a particular user. To date, the recognition speeds of the FPGA-based universal accelerators for high-throughput seed sorting tasks are slow, which cannot guarantee real-time seed sorting. Therefore, a block-based and highly parallel MobileNetV2 accelerator is proposed in this paper. First, a hardware-friendly quantization method that uses only fixed-point operation is designed to reduce resource consumption. Then, the block convolution strategy is proposed to avoid latency and energy consumption increase caused by large-scale intermediate result off-chip data transfers. Finally, two scalable computing engines are explicitly designed for depth-wise convolution (DWC) and point-wise convolution (PWC) to develop the high parallelism of block convolution computation. Moreover, an efficient memory system with a double buffering mechanism and new data reordering mode is designed to address the imbalance between memory access and parallel computing. Our proposed FPGA-based MobileNetV2 accelerator for real-time seed sorting is implemented and evaluated on the platform of Xilinx XC7020. Experimental results demonstrate that our implementation can achieve about 29.4 frames per second (FPS) and 10.86 Giga operations per second (GOPS), and 0.92× to 5.70 × DSP-efficiency compared with previous FPGA-based accelerators.

Analytical study of two feature extraction methods in comparison with deep learning methods for classification of small metal objects

This paper addresses the efficiency of two feature extraction methods for classifying small metal objects including screws, nuts, keys, and coins: the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and local binary pattern (LBP). The desired features for the labeled images are first extracted and saved in the form of a feature matrix. Using three different classification methods (non-parametric K-nearest neighbors algorithm, support vector machine, and naïve Bayesian method), the images are classified into four different classes. Then, by examining the resulting confusion matrix, the performances of the HOG and LBP approaches are compared for these four classes. The effectiveness of these two methods is also compared with the “You Only Look Once” and faster region-based convolutional neural network approaches, which are based on deep learning. The collected image set in this paper includes 800 labeled training images and 180 test images. The results show that the use of the HOG is more efficient than the use of the LBP. Moreover, a combination of the HOG and LBP provides better results than either alone.

Smart Agriculture Cloud Using AI Based Techniques

This research proposes a generic smart cloud-based system in order to accommodate multiple scenarios where agriculture farms using Internet of Things (IoTs) need to be monitored remotely. The real-time and stored data are analyzed by specialists and farmers. The cloud acts as a central digital data store where information is collected from diverse sources in huge volumes and variety, such as audio, video, image, text, and digital maps. Artificial Intelligence (AI) based machine learning models such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), which is one of many classification types, are used to accurately classify the data. The classified data are assigned to the virtual machines where these data are processed and finally available to the end-users via underlying datacenters. This processed form of digital information is then used by the farmers to improve their farming skills and to update them as pre-disaster recovery for smart agri-food. Furthermore, it will provide general and specific information about international markets relating to their crops. This proposed system discovers the feasibility of the developed digital agri-farm using IoT-based cloud and provides solutions to problems. Overall, the approach works well and achieved performance efficiency in terms of execution time by 14%, throughput time by 5%, overhead time by 9%, and energy efficiency by 13.2% in the presence of competing smart farming baselines.