Two-Stage Convolutional Neural Networks for Diagnosing the Severity of Alternaria Leaf Blotch Disease of the Apple Tree

Abstract

In many parts of the world, apple trees suffer from severe foliar damage each year due to infection of Alternaria blotch (Alternaria alternata f. sp. Mali), resulting in serious economic losses to growers. Traditional methods for disease detection and severity classification mostly rely on manual labor, which is slow, labor-intensive and highly subjective. There is an urgent need to develop an effective protocol to rapidly and accurately evaluate disease severity. In this study, DeeplabV3+, PSPNet and UNet were used to assess the severity of apple Alternaria leaf blotch. For identifications of leaves and disease areas, the dataset with a total of 5382 samples was randomly split into 74% (4004 samples) for model training, 9% (494 samples) for validation, 8% (444 samples) for testing and 8% (440 samples) for overall testing. Apple leaves were first segmented from complex backgrounds using the deep-learning algorithms with different backbones. Then, the recognition of disease areas was performed on the segmented leaves. The results showed that the PSPNet model with MobileNetV2 backbone exhibited the highest performance in leaf segmentation, with precision, recall and MIoU values of 99.15%, 99.26% and 98.42%, respectively. The UNet model with VGG backbone performed the best in disease-area prediction, with a precision of 95.84%, a recall of 95.54% and a MIoU value of 92.05%. The ratio of disease area to leaf area was calculated to assess the disease severity. The results showed that the average accuracy for severity classification was 96.41%. Moreover, both the correlation coefficient and the consistency correlation coefficient were 0.992, indicating a high agreement between the reference values and the value that the research predicted. This study proves the feasibility of rapid estimation of the severity of apple Alternaria leaf blotch, which will provide technical support for precise application of pesticides.