The rapid, recent development of image recognition technologies has led to the widespread use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in automated image classification and in the recognition of plant diseases. Aims: The aim of the present study was to develop a deep CNNs to identify tea plant disease types from leaf images. Materials: A CNNs model named LeafNet was developed with different sized feature extractor filters that automatically extract the features of tea plant diseases from images. DSIFT (dense scale-invariant feature transform) features are also extracted and used to construct a bag of visual words (BOVW) model that is then used to classify diseases via support vector machine(SVM) and multi-layer perceptron(MLP) classifiers. The performance of the three classifiers in disease recognition were then individually evaluated. Results: The LeafNet algorithm identified tea leaf diseases most accurately, with an average classification accuracy of 90.16%, while that of the SVM algorithm was 60.62% and that of the MLP algorithm was 70.77%. Conclusions: The LeafNet was clearly superior in the recognition of tea leaf diseases compared to the MLP and SVM algorithms. Consequently, the LeafNet can be used in future applications to improve the efficiency and accuracy of disease diagnoses in tea plants.

Botrytis cinerea is the pathogen of gray mold disease affecting a wide range of plant hosts, with consequential economic losses worldwide. The increased frequency of fungicide resistance of the pathogen challenges its disease management, and thus the development of alternative control strategies are urgently required. In this study, we showed excellent synergistic interactions between resveratrol and pyrimethanil. Significant synergistic values were recorded by the two-drug combination on the suppression of mycelial growth and conidia germination of B. cinerea. The combination of resveratrol and pyrimethanil caused malformation of mycelia. Moreover, the inoculation assay was conducted on table grape and consistent synergistic suppression of the two-drug combination was found in vivo. Our findings first revealed that the combination of resveratrol and pyrimethanil has synergistic effects against resistant B. cinerea and support the potential use of resveratrol as a promising adjuvant on the control of gray mold.

Due to the benefits of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image classification, they have been extensively used in the computerized classification and focus of crop pests. The intention of the current find out about is to advance a deep convolutional neural network to mechanically identify 14 species of tea pests that possess symmetry properties. (1) As there are not enough tea pests images in the network to train the deep convolutional neural network, we proposes to classify tea pests images by fine-tuning the VGGNET-16 deep convolutional neural network. (2) Through comparison with traditional machine learning algorithms Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), the performance of our method is evaluated (3) The three methods can identify tea tree pests well: the proposed convolutional neural network classification has accuracy up to 97.75%, while MLP and SVM have accuracies of 76.07% and 68.81%, respectively. Our proposed method performs the best of the assessed recognition algorithms. The experimental results also show that the fine-tuning method is a very powerful and efficient tool for small datasets in practical problems.