Alternaria leaf spot, Brown spot, Mosaic, Grey spot and Rust are five common types of apple leaf diseases that severely affect apple yield. However, the existing research lacks an accurate and fast detector of apple diseases for ensuring the healthy development of the apple industry. This paper proposes a deep learning approach that is based on improved convolutional neural networks for the real-time detection of apple leaf diseases. In this study, the apple leaf disease dataset (ALDD), which is composed of laboratory images and complex images under real field conditions, is first constructed via data augmentation and image annotation technologies. Based on this, a new apple leaf disease detection model that uses deep convolutional neural networks is proposed by introducing the GoogLeNet Inception structure and Rainbow concatenation. Finally, under the hold-out testing dataset, using a dataset of 26,377 images of diseased apple leaves, the proposed INAR-SSD (SSD with Inception module and Rainbow concatenation) model is trained to detect these five common apple leaf diseases. The experimental results show that the INAR-SSD model realizes a detection performance of 78.80.

Mosaic, Rust, Brown spot, and Alternaria leaf spot are the four common types of apple leaf diseases. Early diagnosis and accurate identification of apple leaf diseases can control the spread of infection and ensure the healthy development of the apple industry. The existing research uses complex image preprocessing and cannot guarantee high recognition rates for apple leaf diseases. This paper proposes an accurate identifying approach for apple leaf diseases based on deep convolutional neural networks. It includes generating sufficient pathological images and designing a novel architecture of a deep convolutional neural network based on AlexNet to detect apple leaf diseases. Using a dataset of 13,689 images of diseased apple leaves, the proposed deep convolutional neural network model is trained to identify the four common apple leaf diseases. Under the hold-out test set, the experimental results show that the proposed disease identification approach based on the convolutional neural network achieves an overall accuracy of 97.62%, the model parameters are reduced by 51,206,928 compared with those in the standard AlexNet model, and the accuracy of the proposed model with generated pathological images obtains an improvement of 10.83%. This research indicates that the proposed deep learning model provides a better solution in disease control for apple leaf diseases with high accuracy and a faster convergence rate, and that the image generation technique proposed in this paper can enhance the robustness of the convolutional neural network model.

Black rot, Black measles, Leaf blight and Mites of grape are four common grape leaf diseases that seriously affect grape yield. However, the existing research lacks a real-time detecting method for grape leaf diseases, which cannot guarantee the healthy growth of grape plants. In this article, a real-time detector for grape leaf diseases based on improved deep convolutional neural networks is proposed. This article first expands the grape leaf disease images through digital image processing technology, constructing the grape leaf disease dataset (GLDD). Based on GLDD and the Faster R-CNN detection algorithm, a deep-learning-based Faster DR-IACNN model with higher feature extraction capability is presented for detecting grape leaf diseases by introducing the Inception-v1 module, Inception-ResNet-v2 module and SE-blocks. The experimental results show that the detection model Faster DR-IACNN achieves a precision of 81.1% mAP on GLDD, and the detection speed reaches 15.01 FPS. This research indicates that the real-time detector Faster DR-IACNN based on deep learning provides a feasible solution for the diagnosis of grape leaf diseases and provides guidance for the detection of other plant diseases.

Anthracnose, brown spot, mites, black rot, downy mildew, and leaf blight are six common grape leaf pests and diseases, which cause severe economic losses to the grape industry. Timely diagnosis and accurate identification of grape leaf diseases are decisive for controlling the spread of disease and ensuring the healthy development of the grape industry. This paper proposes a novel recognition approach that is based on improved convolutional neural networks for the diagnoses of grape leaf diseases. First, based on 4,023 images collected in the field and 3,646 images collected from public data sets, a data set of 107,366 grape leaf images is generated via image enhancement techniques. Afterward, Inception structure is applied for strengthening the performance of multi-dimensional feature extraction. In addition, a dense connectivity strategy is introduced to encourage feature reuse and strengthen feature propagation. Ultimately, a novel CNN-based model, namely, DICNN, is built and trained from scratch. It realizes an overall accuracy of 97.22% under the hold-out test set. Compared to GoogLeNet and ResNet-34, the recognition accuracy increases by 2.97% and 2.55%, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can efficiently recognize grape leaf diseases. Meanwhile, this study explores a new approach for the rapid and accurate diagnosis of plant diseases that establishes a theoretical foundation for the application of deep learning in the field of agricultural information.

The identification of grape leaf diseases based on deep learning is critical to controlling the spread of diseases and ensuring the healthy development of the grape industry. Focusing on the lack of training images of grape leaf diseases, this paper proposes a novel model named Leaf GAN, which is based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), to generate images of four different grape leaf diseases for training identification models. A generator model with degressive channels is first designed to generate grape leaf disease images; then, the dense connectivity strategy and instance normalization are fused into an efficient discriminator to identify real and fake disease images by utilizing their excellent feature extraction capability on grape leaf lesions. Finally, the deep regret gradient penalty method is applied to stabilize the training process of the model. Using a total of 4,062 grape leaf disease images, the Leaf GAN model ultimately generates 8,124 grape leaf disease images. The generated grape leaf disease images based on Leaf GAN model can obtain better performance than DCGAN and WGAN in terms of the Fréchet inception distance. The experimental results show that the proposed Leaf GAN model generates sufficient grape leaf disease images with prominent lesions, providing a feasible solution for the data augmentation of grape leaf disease images. For the eight prevailing classification models with the expanded dataset, the identification performance based on CNNs indicated higher accuracies, whereby all the accuracies were better than those of the initial dataset with other data augmentation methods. Among them, Xception achieves a recognition accuracy of 98.70% on the testing set. The results demonstrate that the proposed data augmentation method represents a new approach to overcoming the overfitting problem in disease identification and can effectively improve the identification accuracy.

The accurate identification of apple leaf diseases is of great significance for controlling the spread of diseases and ensuring the healthy and stable development of the apple industry. In order to improve detection accuracy and efficiency, a deep learning model, which is called the Coordination Attention EfficientNet (CA-ENet), is proposed to identify different apple diseases. First, a coordinate attention block is integrated into the EfficientNet-B4 network, which embedded the spatial location information of the feature by channel attention to ensure that the model can learn both the channel and spatial location information of important features. Then, a depth-wise separable convolution is applied to the convolution module to reduce the number of parameters, and the h-swish activation function is introduced to achieve the fast and easy to quantify the process. Afterward, 5,170 images are collected in the field environment at the apple planting base of the Northwest A&F University, while 3,000 images are acquired from the PlantVillage public data set. Also, image augmentation techniques are used to generate an Apple Leaf Disease Identification Data set (ALDID), which contains 81,700 images. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the CA-ENet is 98.92% on the ALDID, and the average F1-score reaches .988, which is better than those of common models such as the ResNet-152, DenseNet-264, and ResNeXt-101. The generated test dataset is used to test the anti-interference ability of the model. The results show that the proposed method can achieve competitive performance on the apple disease identification task.