In this paper, a method for detecting rapid rice disease based on FCM-KM and Faster R-CNN fusion is proposed to address various problems with the rice disease images, such as noise, blurred image edge, large background interference and low detection accuracy. Firstly, the method uses a two-dimensional filtering mask combined with a weighted multi-level median filter (2DFM-AMMF) for noise reduction, and uses a faster two-dimensional Otsu threshold segmentation algorithm (Faster 2D-Otsu) to reduce the interference of complex background with the detection of target blade in the image. Then the dynamic population firefly algorithm based on the chaos theory as well as the maximum and minimum distance algorithm is applied for optimization of the K-Means clustering algorithm (FCM-KM) to determine the optimal clustering class k value while addressing the tendency of the algorithm to fall into the local optimum problem. Combined with the R-CNN algorithm for the identification of rice diseases, FCM-KM analysis is conducted to determine the different sizes of the Faster R-CNN target frame. As revealed by the application results of 3010 images, the accuracy and time required for detection of rice blast, bacterial blight and blight were 96.71%/0.65s, 97.53%/0.82s and 98.26%/0.53s, respectively, indicating clearly that the method is more capable of detecting rice diseases and improving the identification accuracy of Faster R-CNN algorithm, while reducing the time required for identification.

The identification of maize leaf diseases will meet great challenges because of the difficulties in extracting lesion features from the constant-changing environment, uneven illumination reflection of the incident light source and many other factors. In this paper, a novel maize leaf disease recognition method is proposed. In this method, we first designed a maize leaf feature enhancement framework with the capability of enhancing the features of maize under the complex environment. Then a novel neural network is designed based on backbone Alexnet architecture, named DMS-Robust Alexnet. In the DMS-Robust Alexnet, dilated convolution and multi-scale convolution are combined to improve the capability of feature extraction. Batch normalization is performed to prevent network over-fitting while enhancing the robustness of the model. PRelu activation function and Adabound optimizer are employed to improve both convergence and accuracy. In experiments, it is validated from different perspectives that the maize leaf disease feature enhancement algorithm is conducive to improving the capability of the DMS-Robust Alexnet identification. Our method demonstrates strong robustness for maize disease images collected in the natural environment, providing a reference for the intelligent diagnosis of other plant leaf diseases.

Tomato disease control is an urgent requirement in the field of intellectual agriculture, and one of the keys to it is quantitative identification and precise segmentation of tomato leaf diseases. Some diseased areas on tomato leaves are tiny and may go unnoticed during segmentation. Blurred edge also makes the segmentation accuracy poor. Based on UNet, we propose an effective image-based tomato leaf disease segmentation method called Cross-layer Attention Fusion Mechanism combined with Multi-scale Convolution Module (MC-UNet). First, a Multi-scale Convolution Module is proposed. This module obtains multiscale information about tomato disease by employing 3 convolution kernels of different sizes, and it highlights the edge feature information of tomato disease using the Squeeze-and-Excitation Module. Second, a Cross-layer Attention Fusion Mechanism is proposed. This mechanism highlights tomato leaf disease locations via gating structure and fusion operation. Then, we employ SoftPool rather than MaxPool to retain valid information on tomato leaves. Finally, we use the SeLU function appropriately to avoid network neuron dropout. We compared MC-UNet to the existing segmentation network on our self-built tomato leaf disease segmentation dataset and MC-UNet achieved 91.32% accuracy and 6.67M parameters. Our method achieves good results for tomato leaf disease segmentation, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Tomato leaf diseases have a significant impact on tomato cultivation modernization. Object detection is an important technique for disease prevention since it may collect reliable disease information. Tomato leaf diseases occur in a variety of environments, which can lead to intraclass variability and interclass similarity in the disease. Tomato plants are commonly planted in soil. When a disease occurs near the leaf’s edge, the soil backdrop in the image tends to interfere with the infected region. These problems can make tomato detection challenging. In this paper, we propose a precise image-based tomato leaf disease detection approach using PLPNet. First, a perceptual adaptive convolution module is proposed. It can effectively extract the disease’s defining characteristics. Second, a location reinforcement attention mechanism is proposed at the neck of the network. It suppresses the interference of the soil backdrop and prevents extraneous information from accessing the network’s feature fusion phase. Then, a proximity feature aggregation network with switchable atrous convolution and deconvolution is proposed by combining the mechanisms of secondary observation and feature consistency. The network solves the problem of disease interclass similarities. Finally, the experimental results show that PLPNet achieved 94.5% mean average precision with 50% thresholds (mAP50), 54.4% average recall (AR), and 25.45 frames per second (FPS) on a self-built dataset. The model is more accurate and specific for the detection of tomato leaf diseases than other popular detectors. Our proposed method may effectively improve conventional tomato leaf disease detection and provide modern tomato cultivation management with reference experience.