Summary: | 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 <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>91.2</mn><mo>%</mo></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>95.9</mn><mo>%</mo></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>, 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 <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>9.05</mn><mo>%</mo></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula> increase in precision and <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>7.6</mn><mo>%</mo></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula> 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.
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