Deep learning is a branch of artificial intelligence. In recent years, with the advantages of automatic learning and feature extraction, it has been widely concerned by academic and industrial circles. It has been widely used in image and video processing, voice processing, and natural language processing. At the same time, it has also become a research hotspot in the field of agricultural plant protection, such as plant disease recognition and pest range assessment, etc. The application of deep learning in plant disease recognition can avoid the disadvantages caused by artificial selection of disease spot features, make plant disease feature extraction more objective, and improve the research efficiency and technology transformation speed. This review provides the research progress of deep learning technology in the field of crop leaf disease identification in recent years. In this paper, we present the current trends and challenges for the detection of plant leaf disease using deep learning and advanced imaging techniques. We hope that this work will be a valuable resource for researchers who study the detection of plant diseases and insect pests. At the same time, we also discussed some of the current challenges and problems that need to be resolved.

The intelligent identification and classification of plant diseases is an important research objective in agriculture. In this study, in order to realize the rapid and accurate identification of apple leaf disease, a new lightweight convolutional neural network RegNet was proposed. A series of comparative experiments had been conducted based on 2141 images of 5 apple leaf diseases (rust, scab, ring rot, panonychus ulmi, and healthy leaves) in the field environment. To assess the effectiveness of the RegNet model, a series of comparison experiments were conducted with state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNN) such as ShuffleNet, EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3, and Vision Transformer. The results show that RegNet-Adam with a learning rate of 0.0001 obtained an average accuracy of 99.8% on the validation set and an overall accuracy of 99.23% on the test set, outperforming all other pre-trained models. In other words, the proposed method based on transfer learning established in this research can realize the rapid and accurate identification of apple leaf disease.

The accurate segmentation of apple leaf disease spots is the key to identifying the classification of apple leaf diseases and disease severity. Therefore, a DeepLabV3+ semantic segmentation network model with an actors spatial pyramid pool module (ASPP) was proposed to achieve effective extraction of apple leaf lesion features and to improve the apple leaf disease recognition and disease severity diagnosis compared with the classical semantic segmentation network models PSPNet and GCNet. In addition, the effects of the learning rate, optimizer, and backbone network on the performance of the DeepLabV3+ network model with the best performance were analyzed. The experimental results show that the mean pixel accuracy (MPA) and mean intersection over union (MIoU) of the model reached 97.26% and 83.85%, respectively. After being deployed into the smartphone platform, the detection time of the detection system was 9s per image for the portable and intelligent diagnostics of apple leaf diseases. The transfer learning method provided the possibility of quickly acquiring a high-performance model under the condition of small datasets. The research results can provide a precise guide for the prevention and precise control of apple diseases in fields.

Detection of skin defects in Cerasus humilis fruit is a critical process to guarantee its quality and price. This study presents a valid method for the detection of defective features in Cerasus humilis fruits based on hyperspectral imaging. A total of 420 sample images were acquired that included three types of natural defects and undamaged samples. After acquiring hyperspectral images of Cerasus humilis fruits, the spectral data were extracted from the region of interest (ROI). Five spectral preprocessing methods were used to preprocess the original spectral data, including Savitsky–Golay (S-G), standard normal variate (SNV), multiplicative scatter correction (MSC), baseline correction (BC), and de-trending (De-T). Regression coefficient (RC), successive projections algorithm (SPA), and competitive adaptive reweighed sampling (CARS) were conducted to select optimal sensitive wavelengths (SWs); as a result, 11 SWs, 17 SWs, and 13 SWs were selected, respectively. Then, the least squares-support vector machine (LS-SVM) discrimination model was established using the selected SWs. The results showed that the discriminate accuracy of the CARS-LS-SVM method was 91.43%. Based on the characteristics of image information, images corresponding to eight sensitive wavebands (950, 994, 1071, 1263, 1336, 1457, 1542, and 1628 nm) selected by CARS were subjected to principal component analysis (PCA). Then, an effective approach for detecting the defective features was exploited based on the imfill function, canny operator, region growing algorithm, bwareaopen function, and the images of PCA. The location and area of defect feature of 105 Cerasus humilis fruits could be recognized; the detect precision was 88.57%. This investigation demonstrated that hyperspectral imaging combined with an image processing technique could achieve the rapid identification of undamaged samples and natural defects in Cerasus humilis fruit. This provides a theoretical basis for the development of Cerasus humilis fruit grading and sorting equipment.

Cerasus Humilis fruit is susceptible to rapid color changes post-harvest, which degrades its quality. This research utilized hyperspectral imaging technology to detect and visually analyze the soluble solid content (SSC) and firmness of the fruit, aiming to improve quality and achieve optimal pricing. Four maturity stages (color turning stage, coloring stage, maturity stage, and fully ripe stage) of Cerasus Humilis fruit were examined using hyperspectral images (895–1700 nm) alongside data collection on SSC and firmness. These samples were divided into a calibration set and a validation set with a ratio of 3:1 by sample set partitioning based on the joint X-Y distances (SPXY) method. The original spectral data was processed by a spectral preprocessing method. Multiple linear regression (MLR) and nonlinear least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) detection models were established using feature wavelengths selected by the successive projections algorithm (SPA), competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS), uninformative variable elimination (UVE), and two combined downscaling algorithms (UVE-SPA and UVE-CARS), respectively. For SSC and firmness detection, the best models were the SNV-SPA-LS-SVM model with 18 feature wavelengths and the original spectra-UVE-CARS-LS-SVM model with eight feature wavelengths, respectively. For SSC, the correlation coefficient of prediction (Rp) was 0.8526, the root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) was 0.9703, and the residual prediction deviation (RPD) was 1.9017. For firmness, Rp was 0.7879, RMSEP was 1.1205, and RPD was 2.0221. Furthermore, the optimal model was employed to retrieve the distribution of SSC and firmness within Cerasus Humilis fruit. This retrieved information facilitated visual inspection, enabling a more intuitive and comprehensive assessment of SSC and firmness at each pixel level. These findings demonstrated the effectiveness of hyperspectral imaging technology for determining SSC and firmness in Cerasus Humilis fruit. This paves the way for online monitoring of fruit quality, ultimately facilitating timely harvesting.