Plant disease is one of the primary causes of crop yield reduction. With the development of computer vision and deep learning technology, autonomous detection of plant surface lesion images collected by optical sensors has become an important research direction for timely crop disease diagnosis. In this paper, an anthracnose lesion detection method based on deep learning is proposed. Firstly, for the problem of insufficient image data caused by the random occurrence of apple diseases, in addition to traditional image augmentation techniques, Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) deep learning model is used in this paper to accomplish data augmentation. These methods effectively enrich the diversity of training data and provide a solid foundation for training the detection model. In this paper, on the basis of image data augmentation, densely connected neural network (DenseNet) is utilized to optimize feature layers of the YOLO-V3 model which have lower resolution. DenseNet greatly improves the utilization of features in the neural network and enhances the detection result of the YOLO-V3 model. It is verified in experiments that the improved model exceeds Faster R-CNN with VGG16 NET, the original YOLO-V3 model, and other three state-of-the-art networks in detection performance, and it can realize real-time detection. The proposed method can be well applied to the detection of anthracnose lesions on apple surfaces in orchards.

Scoliosis is a common disease of the spine and requires regular monitoring due to its progressive properties. A preferred indicator to assess scoliosis is by the Cobb angle, which is currently measured either manually by the relevant medical staff or semi-automatically, aided by a computer. These methods are not only labor-intensive but also vary in precision by the inter-observer and intra-observer. Therefore, a reliable and convenient method is urgently needed. With the development of computer vision and deep learning, it is possible to automatically calculate the Cobb angles by processing X-ray or CT/MR/US images. In this paper, the research progress of Cobb angle measurement in recent years is reviewed from the perspectives of computer vision and deep learning. By comparing the measurement effects of typical methods, their advantages and disadvantages are analyzed. Finally, the key issues and their development trends are also discussed.

The failure of an insulator may compromise the safety of the entire power transmission system. Therefore, insulator defect detection is vital for the safe operation of power systems. However, insulator defects in an insulator image may have varying sizes, and several currently available methods do not have satisfactory detection accuracy for small defects. To address this issue, we propose an improved detection network for small insulator defects with a batch normalization convolutional block attention module (BN-CBAM) and a feature fusion module. The BN-CBAM is designed to better exploit channel information and enhance the effect of different channels on the feature map. In addition, we propose a feature fusion module that fuses multi-scale features from different layers to improve small object detection performance. Moreover, to address the scarcity of aerial images, a data augmentation method based on the fusion of the target segment and background is introduced. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better small insulator defect detection performance than other state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, data augmentation methods enrich sample diversity and enhance the generalizability of the network.