Disease severity grading is the primary decision-making basis for the amount of pesticide usage in vegetable disease prevention and control. Based on deep learning, this paper proposed an integrated framework, which automatically segments the target leaf and disease spots in cucumber images using different semantic segmentation networks and then calculates the area of disease spots and the target leaf for disease severity grading. Two independent datasets of leaves and lesions were constructed, which served as the training set for the first-stage diseased leaf segmentation and the second-stage lesion segmentation models. The leaf dataset contains 1140 images, and the lesion data set contains 405 images. The proposed TRNet was composed of a convolutional network and a Transformer network and achieved an accuracy of 93.94% by fusing local features and global features for leaf segmentation. In the second stage, U-Net (Resnet50 as the feature network) was used for lesion segmentation, and a Dice coefficient of 68.14% was obtained. After integrating TRNet and U-Net, a Dice coefficient of 68.83% was obtained. Overall, the two-stage segmentation network achieved an average accuracy of 94.49% and 94.43% in the severity grading of cucumber downy mildew and cucumber anthracnose, respectively. Compared with DUNet and BLSNet, the average accuracy of TUNet in cucumber downy mildew and cucumber anthracnose severity classification increased by 4.71% and 8.08%, respectively. The proposed model showed a strong capability in segmenting cucumber leaves and disease spots at the pixel level, providing a feasible method for evaluating the severity of cucumber downy mildew and anthracnose.

The plant disease recognition model based on deep learning has shown good performance potential. However, high complexity and nonlinearity lead to the low transparency and poor interpretability of such models. These limitations greatly limit the deployment and application of such models in field scenarios. To solve the above problems, we propose a dense caption generative model, Veg DenseCap. This model takes vegetable leaf images as input and uses object detection technology to locate abnormal parts of the leaf and identify the disease results. More importantly, it can describe the disease features it sees in natural language, and users can judge whether the relevant features are semantically consistent with human cognition based on these descriptions. First of all, a dataset containing Chinese feature description statements for images of 10 leaf diseases involving two vegetables (cucumber and tomato) was established. Secondly, Faster R-CNN was used as a disease detector to extract visual features of diseases, and LSTM was used as a language generator to generate description statements for disease features. Finally, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and the Focal Loss function were employed to overcome the imbalance between positive and negative samples and the weak performance of Faster R-CNN in obtaining key features. According to the test results, the Intersection-over-Union (IoU) and Meteor joint evaluation index of Veg-DenseCap achieved a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 88.0% on the dense captioning dataset of vegetable leaf disease images, which is 9.1% higher than that of the classical FCLN model. The automatically generated description statements are characterized by advantages of accurate feature description, correct grammar, and high diversity.

Power is an issue that must be considered in the design of logic circuits. Power optimization is a combinatorial optimization problem, since it is necessary to search for a logical expression that consumes the least amount of power from a large number of Reed-Muller (RM) logical expressions. The existing approach for optimizing the power of multi-output mixed polarity RM (MPRM) logic circuits suffer from poor optimization results. To solve this problem, a whale optimization algorithm with two-populations strategy and mutation strategy (TMWOA) is proposed in this paper. The two-populations strategy speeds up the convergence of the algorithm by exchanging information about the two-populations. The mutation strategy enhances the ability of the algorithm to jump out of the local optimal solutions by using the information of the current optimal solution. Based on the TMWOA, we propose a multi-output MPRM logic circuits power optimization approach (TMMPOA). Experiments based on the benchmark circuits of the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed TMMPOA.