SSM-Net for Plants Disease Identification in Low Data Regime
This addresses the problem of data scarcity in agricultural disease detection for farmers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing few-shot learning methods.
The paper tackled plant disease identification with limited data by proposing SSM-Net, a few-shot learning architecture, achieving accuracies of 92.7% and 94.3% on two datasets, with improvements of about 10% and 5% over a VGG16 baseline.
Plant disease detection is an essential factor in increasing agricultural production. Due to the difficulty of disease detection, farmers spray various pesticides on their crops to protect them, causing great harm to crop growth and food standards. Deep learning can offer critical aid in detecting such diseases. However, it is highly inconvenient to collect a large volume of data on all forms of the diseases afflicting a specific plant species. In this paper, we propose a new metrics-based few-shot learning SSM net architecture, which consists of stacked siamese and matching network components to address the problem of disease detection in low data regimes. We demonstrated our experiments on two datasets: mini-leaves diseases and sugarcane diseases dataset. We have showcased that the SSM-Net approach can achieve better decision boundaries with an accuracy of 92.7% on the mini-leaves dataset and 94.3% on the sugarcane dataset. The accuracy increased by ~10% and ~5% respectively, compared to the widely used VGG16 transfer learning approach. Furthermore, we attained F1 score of 0.90 using SSM Net on the sugarcane dataset and 0.91 on the mini-leaves dataset. Our code implementation is available on Github: https://github.com/shruti-jadon/PlantsDiseaseDetection.