Uncertainty quantification for plant disease detection using Bayesian deep learning

Enhanced multiscale plant disease detection with the PYOLO model innovations

Timely detection of plant diseases is crucial for agricultural safety, product quality, and environmental protection. However, plant disease detection faces several challenges, including the diversity of plant disease scenarios and complex backgrounds. To address these issues, we propose a plant disease detection model named PYOLO. Firstly, the model enhances feature fusion capabilities by optimizing the PAN structure, introducing a weighted bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN), and repeatedly fusing top and bottom scale features. Additionally, the model's ability to focus on different parts of the image is improved by redesigning the EC2f structure and dynamically adjusting the convolutional kernel size to better capture features at various scales. Finally, the MHC2f mechanism is designed to enhance the model's ability to perceive complex backgrounds and targets at different scales by utilizing its self-attention mechanism for parallel processing. Experiments demonstrate that the model's mAP value increases by 4.1% compared to YOLOv8n, confirming its superiority in plant disease detection.

Intelligent agricultural robotic detection system for greenhouse tomato leaf diseases using soft computing techniques and deep learning

The development of soft computing methods has had a significant influence on the subject of autonomous intelligent agriculture. This paper offers a system for autonomous greenhouse navigation that employs a fuzzy control algorithm and a deep learning-based disease classification model for tomato plants, identifying illnesses using photos of tomato leaves. The primary novelty in this study is the introduction of an upgraded Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN) that creates augmented pictures of disease tomato leaves from original genuine samples, considerably enhancing the training dataset. To find the optimum training model, four deep learning networks (VGG19, Inception-v3, DenseNet-201, and ResNet-152) were carefully compared on a dataset of nine tomato leaf disease classes. These models have validation accuracy of 92.32%, 90.83%, 96.61%, and 97.07%, respectively, when using the original PlantVillage dataset. The system then uses an enhanced dataset with ResNet-152 network design to achieve a high accuracy of 99.69%, as compared to the original dataset with ResNet-152's accuracy of 97.07%. This improvement indicates the use of the proposed DCGAN in improving the performance of the deep learning model for greenhouse plant monitoring and disease detection. Furthermore, the proposed approach may have a broader use in various agricultural scenarios, potentially altering the field of autonomous intelligent agriculture.

Uncertainty quantification in multi-class image classification using chest X-ray images of COVID-19 and pneumonia

This paper investigates uncertainty quantification (UQ) techniques in multi-class classification of chest X-ray images (COVID-19, Pneumonia, and Normal). We evaluate Bayesian Neural Networks (BNN) and the Deep Neural Network with UQ (DNN with UQ) techniques, including Monte Carlo dropout, Ensemble Bayesian Neural Network (EBNN), Ensemble Monte Carlo (EMC) dropout, across different evaluation metrics. Our analysis reveals that DNN with UQ, especially EBNN and EMC dropout, consistently outperform BNNs. For example, in Class 0 vs. All, EBNN achieved a UAcc of 92.6%, UAUC-ROC of 95.0%, and a Brier Score of 0.157, significantly surpassing BNN's performance. Similarly, EMC Dropout excelled in Class 1 vs. All with a UAcc of 83.5%, UAUC-ROC of 95.8%, and a Brier Score of 0.165. These advanced models demonstrated higher accuracy, better discriaminative capability, and more accurate probabilistic predictions. Our findings highlight the efficacy of DNN with UQ in enhancing model reliability and interpretability, making them highly suitable for critical healthcare applications like chest X-ray imageQ6 classification.

Plant science in the age of simulation intelligence

Historically, plant and crop sciences have been quantitative fields that intensively use measurements and modeling. Traditionally, researchers choose between two dominant modeling approaches: mechanistic plant growth models or data-driven, statistical methodologies. At the intersection of both paradigms, a novel approach referred to as "simulation intelligence", has emerged as a powerful tool for comprehending and controlling complex systems, including plants and crops. This work explores the transformative potential for the plant science community of the nine simulation intelligence motifs, from understanding molecular plant processes to optimizing greenhouse control. Many of these concepts, such as surrogate models and agent-based modeling, have gained prominence in plant and crop sciences. In contrast, some motifs, such as open-ended optimization or program synthesis, still need to be explored further. The motifs of simulation intelligence can potentially revolutionize breeding and precision farming towards more sustainable food production.

Emerging Themes and Approaches in Plant Virus Epidemiology

Plant diseases caused by viruses share many common features with those caused by other pathogen taxa in terms of the host-pathogen interaction, but there are also distinctive features in epidemiology, most apparent where transmission is by vectors. Consequently, the host-virus-vector-environment interaction presents a continuing challenge in attempts to understand and predict the course of plant virus epidemics. Theoretical concepts, based on the underlying biology, can be expressed in mathematical models and tested through quantitative assessments of epidemics in the field; this remains a goal in understanding why plant virus epidemics occur and how they can be controlled. To this end, this review identifies recent emerging themes and approaches to fill in knowledge gaps in plant virus epidemiology. We review quantitative work on the impact of climatic fluctuations and change on plants, viruses, and vectors under different scenarios where impacts on the individual components of the plant-virus-vector interaction may vary disproportionately; there is a continuing, sometimes discordant, debate on host resistance and tolerance as plant defense mechanisms, including aspects of farmer behavior and attitudes toward disease management that may affect deployment in crops; disentangling host-virus-vector-environment interactions, as these contribute to temporal and spatial disease progress in field populations; computational techniques for estimating epidemiological parameters from field observations; and the use of optimal control analysis to assess disease control options. We end by proposing new challenges and questions in plant virus epidemiology.

Crop cultivation planning with fuzzy estimation using water wave optimization

In a complex agricultural region, determine the appropriate crop for each plot of land to maximize the expected total profit is the key problem in cultivation management. However, many factors such as cost, yield, and selling price are typically uncertain, which causes an exact programming method impractical. In this paper, we present a problem of crop cultivation planning, where the uncertain factors are estimated as fuzzy parameters. We adapt an efficient evolutionary algorithm, water wave optimization (WWO), to solve this problem, where each solution is evaluated based on three metrics including the expected, optimistic and pessimistic values, the combination of which enables the algorithm to search credible solutions under uncertain conditions. Test results on a set of agricultural regions in East China showed that the solutions of our fuzzy optimization approach obtained significantly higher profits than those of non-fuzzy optimization methods based on only the expected values.

Click-through Rate Prediction and Uncertainty Quantification Based on Bayesian Deep Learning

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a research point for measuring recommendation systems and calculating AD traffic. Existing studies have proved that deep learning performs very well in prediction tasks, but most of the existing studies are based on deterministic models, and there is a big gap in capturing uncertainty. Modeling uncertainty is a major challenge when using machine learning solutions to solve real-world problems in various domains. In order to quantify the uncertainty of the model and achieve accurate and reliable prediction results. This paper designs a CTR prediction framework combining feature selection and feature interaction. In this framework, a CTR prediction model based on Bayesian deep learning is proposed to quantify the uncertainty in the prediction model. On the squeeze network and DNN parallel prediction model framework, the approximate posterior parameter distribution of the model is obtained using the Monte Carlo dropout, and obtains the integrated prediction results. Epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty are defined and adopt information entropy to calculate the sum of the two kinds of uncertainties. Epistemic uncertainty could be measured by mutual information. Experimental results show that the model proposed is superior to other models in terms of prediction performance and has the ability to quantify uncertainty.

A Deep Learning-Based Framework for Uncertainty Quantification in Medical Imaging Using the DropWeak Technique: An Empirical Study with Baresnet

Lung cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related deaths globally. Early detection is crucial for improving patient survival rates. Deep learning (DL) has shown promise in the medical field, but its accuracy must be evaluated, particularly in the context of lung cancer classification. In this study, we conducted uncertainty analysis on various frequently used DL architectures, including Baresnet, to assess the uncertainties in the classification results. This study focuses on the use of deep learning for the classification of lung cancer, which is a critical aspect of improving patient survival rates. The study evaluates the accuracy of various deep learning architectures, including Baresnet, and incorporates uncertainty quantification to assess the level of uncertainty in the classification results. The study presents a novel automatic tumor classification system for lung cancer based on CT images, which achieves a classification accuracy of 97.19% with an uncertainty quantification. The results demonstrate the potential of deep learning in lung cancer classification and highlight the importance of uncertainty quantification in improving the accuracy of classification results. This study's novelty lies in the incorporation of uncertainty quantification in deep learning for lung cancer classification, which can lead to more reliable and accurate diagnoses in clinical settings.

A machine learning approach for cross-domain plant identification using herbarium specimens

The preservation of plant specimens in herbaria has been carried out for centuries in efforts to study and confirm plant taxa. With the increasing collection of herbaria made available digitally, it is practical to use herbarium specimens for the automation of plant identification. They are also substantially more accessible and less expensive to obtain compared to field images. In fact, in remote and inaccessible habitats, field images of rare plant species are still immensely lacking. As a result, rare plant species identification is challenging due to the deficiency of training data. To address this problem, we investigate a cross-domain adaptation approach that allows knowledge transfer from a model learned from herbarium specimens to field images. We propose a model called Herbarium–Field Triplet Loss Network (HFTL network) to learn the mapping between herbarium and field domains. Specifically, the model is trained to maximize the embedding distance of different plant species and minimize the embedding distance of the same plant species given herbarium–field pairs. This paper presents the implementation and performance of the HFTL network to assess the herbarium–field similarity of plants. It corresponds to the cross-domain plant identification challenge in PlantCLEF 2020 and PlantCLEF 2021. Despite the lack of field images, our results show that the network can generalize and identify rare species. Our proposed HFTL network achieved a mean reciprocal rank score of 0.108 and 0.158 on the test set related to the species with few training field photographs in PlantCLEF 2020 and PlantCLEF 2021, respectively.

A Bayesian deep learning method for freeway incident detection with uncertainty quantification

Incident detection is fundamental for freeway management to reduce non-recurrent congestions and secondary incidents. Recently, machine learning technologies have made considerable progress in the incident detection field, but many still face challenges in uncertainty quantification due to the aleatoric uncertainty of traffic data and the epistemic uncertainty of model deviations. In this study, a Bayesian deep learning method was proposed for freeway incident detection with uncertainty quantification. A convolutional neural network variant was designed on a Bayesian framework, and mechanisms of Bayes by backpropagation and local reparameterization technics were used to update the weight of the proposed model. The predictive uncertainty of the proposed method was modeled jointly by integrating the aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. The proposed model was tested on the PORTAL dataset and compared with four benchmark models: standard normal deviate, wavelet neural network, long-short term memory neural network, and convolutional neural network. The results show that the proposed model outperforms the baseline methods in terms of accuracy, detection rate and false alarm rate. Perturbation experiments were used to test the robustness of the model against noise. The results indicated that the aleatoric uncertainty of the model remained almost constant under different noise levels. The proposed method may benefit future studies on uncertainty quantification while using machine learning method in incident management and other fields in intelligent transportation systems.

A Lightweight Model for Wheat Ear Fusarium Head Blight Detection Based on RGB Images

Detection of the Fusarium head blight (FHB) is crucial for wheat yield protection, with precise and rapid FHB detection increasing wheat yield and protecting the agricultural ecological environment. FHB detection tasks in agricultural production are currently handled by cloud servers and utilize unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Hence, this paper proposed a lightweight model for wheat ear FHB detection based on UAV-enabled edge computing, aiming to achieve the purpose of intelligent prevention and control of agricultural disease. Our model utilized the You Only Look Once version 4 (YOLOv4) and MobileNet deep learning architectures and was applicable in edge devices, balancing accuracy, and FHB detection in real-time. Specifically, the backbone network Cross Stage Partial Darknet53 (CSPDarknet53) of YOLOv4 was replaced by a lightweight network, significantly decreasing the network parameters and the computing complexity. Additionally, we employed the Complete Intersection over Union (CIoU) and Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) to regress the loss function to guarantee the detection accuracy of FHB. Furthermore, the loss function incorporated the focal loss to reduce the error caused by the unbalanced positive and negative sample distribution. Finally, mixed-up and transfer learning schemes enhanced the model’s generalization ability. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed model performed admirably well in detecting FHB of the wheat ear, with an accuracy of 93.69%, and it was somewhat better than the MobileNetv2-YOLOv4 model (F1 by 4%, AP by 3.5%, Recall by 4.1%, and Precision by 1.6%). Meanwhile, the suggested model was scaled down to a fifth of the size of the state-of-the-art object detection models. Overall, the proposed model could be deployed on UAVs so that wheat ear FHB detection results could be sent back to the end-users to intelligently decide in time, promoting the intelligent control of agricultural disease.

A survey of few-shot learning in smart agriculture: developments, applications, and challenges

With the rise of artificial intelligence, deep learning is gradually applied to the field of agriculture and plant science. However, the excellent performance of deep learning needs to be established on massive numbers of samples. In the field of plant science and biology, it is not easy to obtain a large amount of labeled data. The emergence of few-shot learning solves this problem. It imitates the ability of humans' rapid learning and can learn a new task with only a small number of labeled samples, which greatly reduces the time cost and financial resources. At present, the advanced few-shot learning methods are mainly divided into four categories based on: data augmentation, metric learning, external memory, and parameter optimization, solving the over-fitting problem from different viewpoints. This review comprehensively expounds on few-shot learning in smart agriculture, introduces the definition of few-shot learning, four kinds of learning methods, the publicly available datasets for few-shot learning, various applications in smart agriculture, and the challenges in smart agriculture in future development.

Deep Learning Based Automatic Grape Downy Mildew Detection

Grape downy mildew (GDM) disease is a common plant leaf disease, and it causes serious damage to grape production, reducing yield and fruit quality. Traditional manual disease detection relies on farm experts and is often time-consuming. Computer vision technologies and artificial intelligence could provide automatic disease detection for real-time controlling the spread of disease on the grapevine in precision viticulture. To achieve the best trade-off between GDM detection accuracy and speed under natural environments, a deep learning based approach named YOLOv5-CA is proposed in this study. Here coordinate attention (CA) mechanism is integrated into YOLOv5, which highlights the downy mildew disease-related visual features to enhance the detection performance. A challenging GDM dataset was acquired in a vineyard under a nature scene (consisting of different illuminations, shadows, and backgrounds) to test the proposed approach. Experimental results show that the proposed YOLOv5-CA achieved a detection precision of 85.59%, a recall of 83.70%, and a mAP@0.5 of 89.55%, which is superior to the popular methods, including Faster R-CNN, YOLOv3, and YOLOv5. Furthermore, our proposed approach with inference occurring at 58.82 frames per second, could be deployed for the real-time disease control requirement. In addition, the proposed YOLOv5-CA based approach could effectively capture leaf disease related visual features resulting in higher GDE detection accuracy. Overall, this study provides a favorable deep learning based approach for the rapid and accurate diagnosis of grape leaf diseases in the field of automatic disease detection.

Multi-Class Plant Leaf Disease Detection Using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Traditional machine learning methods of plant leaf disease detection lack successful performances due to poor feature representation and correlation. This paper presents a novel methodology for automatic plant leaf disease detection using cascaded deep convolutional neural network (CDCNN) which focusses on increasing the feature representation and correlation factors. It provides distinctive features that gives low intra-class variability and higher inter-class variability. CDCNN were performed on a plant-village leaf disease database which consists of 13 classes of tomato, potato, and pepper bell plant diseases; DCNN model performs better with an overall accuracy, recall, and precision of 98.50%, 0.98, and 0.97 respectively. Additionally, performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on real time cotton leaf database for bacterial blight, leaf miner, and spider mite diseases detection and provides 99.00% accuracy. The proposed DCNN outperforms well compared to traditional machine learning and deep learning models and is able to detect the diseases present in the leaves of the plant.

Intelligent system for leaf disease detection using capsule networks for horticulture

Horticulture crops take a crucial part of the Indian economy by creating employment, supplying raw materials to different food processing industries. Mangoes are one of the major crops in horticulture. General Infections in Mango trees are common by various climatic and fungal infections, which became a cause for reducing the quality and quantity of the mangos. The most common diseases with bacterial infection are anthracnose and Powdery Mildew. In recent years, it has been perceived that different variants of deep learning architectures are proposed for detecting and classifying the problems in the agricultural domain. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based architectures have performed amazingly well for disease detection in plants but at the same time lacks rotational or spatial invariance. A relatively new neural organization called Capsule Network (CapsNet) addresses these limitations of CNN architectures. Hence, in this work, a variant of CapsNet called Multilevel CapsNet is introduced to characterize the mango leaves tainted by the anthracnose and powdery mildew diseases. The proposed architecture of this work is validated on a dataset of mango leaves collected in the natural environment. The dataset comprises both healthy and contaminated leaf pictures. The test results approved the undeniable level of exactness of the proposed framework for the characterization of mango leaf diseases with an accuracy of 98.5%. The outcomes conceive the higher-order precision of the proposed Multi-level CapsNet model when contrasted with the other classification algorithms such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) and CNNs.

Image-Based Wheat Fungi Diseases Identification by Deep Learning

Diseases of cereals caused by pathogenic fungi can significantly reduce crop yields. Many cultures are exposed to them. The disease is difficult to control on a large scale; thus, one of the relevant approaches is the crop field monitoring, which helps to identify the disease at an early stage and take measures to prevent its spread. One of the effective control methods is disease identification based on the analysis of digital images, with the possibility of obtaining them in field conditions, using mobile devices. In this work, we propose a method for the recognition of five fungal diseases of wheat shoots (leaf rust, stem rust, yellow rust, powdery mildew, and septoria), both separately and in case of multiple diseases, with the possibility of identifying the stage of plant development. A set of 2414 images of wheat fungi diseases (WFD2020) was generated, for which expert labeling was performed by the type of disease. More than 80% of the images in the dataset correspond to single disease labels (including seedlings), more than 12% are represented by healthy plants, and 6% of the images labeled are represented by multiple diseases. In the process of creating this set, a method was applied to reduce the degeneracy of the training data based on the image hashing algorithm. The disease-recognition algorithm is based on the convolutional neural network with the EfficientNet architecture. The best accuracy (0.942) was shown by a network with a training strategy based on augmentation and transfer of image styles. The recognition method was implemented as a bot on the Telegram platform, which allows users to assess plants by lesions in the field conditions.

Machine Learning in Agriculture: A Comprehensive Updated Review

The digital transformation of agriculture has evolved various aspects of management into artificial intelligent systems for the sake of making value from the ever-increasing data originated from numerous sources. A subset of artificial intelligence, namely machine learning, has a considerable potential to handle numerous challenges in the establishment of knowledge-based farming systems. The present study aims at shedding light on machine learning in agriculture by thoroughly reviewing the recent scholarly literature based on keywords' combinations of "machine learning" along with "crop management", "water management", "soil management", and "livestock management", and in accordance with PRISMA guidelines. Only journal papers were considered eligible that were published within 2018-2020. The results indicated that this topic pertains to different disciplines that favour convergence research at the international level. Furthermore, crop management was observed to be at the centre of attention. A plethora of machine learning algorithms were used, with those belonging to Artificial Neural Networks being more efficient. In addition, maize and wheat as well as cattle and sheep were the most investigated crops and animals, respectively. Finally, a variety of sensors, attached on satellites and unmanned ground and aerial vehicles, have been utilized as a means of getting reliable input data for the data analyses. It is anticipated that this study will constitute a beneficial guide to all stakeholders towards enhancing awareness of the potential advantages of using machine learning in agriculture and contributing to a more systematic research on this topic.