In many regions of the world, wheat is vulnerable to severe yield and quality losses from the fungus disease of Fusarium head blight (FHB). The development of resistant cultivars is one means of ameliorating the devastating effects of this disease, but the breeding process requires the evaluation of hundreds of lines each year for reaction to the disease. These field evaluations are laborious, expensive, time-consuming, and are prone to rater error. A phenotyping cart that can quickly capture images of the spikes of wheat lines and their level of FHB infection would greatly benefit wheat breeding programs. In this study, mask region convolutional neural network (Mask-RCNN) allowed for reliable identification of the symptom location and the disease severity of wheat spikes. Within a wheat line planted in the field, color images of individual wheat spikes and their corresponding diseased areas were labeled and segmented into sub-images. Images with annotated spikes and sub-images of individual spikes with labeled diseased areas were used as ground truth data to train Mask-RCNN models for automatic image segmentation of wheat spikes and FHB diseased areas, respectively. The feature pyramid network (FPN) based on ResNet-101 network was used as the backbone of Mask-RCNN for constructing the feature pyramid and extracting features. After generating mask images of wheat spikes from full-size images, Mask-RCNN was performed to predict diseased areas on each individual spike. This protocol enabled the rapid recognition of wheat spikes and diseased areas with the detection rates of 77.76% and 98.81%, respectively. The prediction accuracy of 77.19% was achieved by calculating the ratio of the wheat FHB severity value of prediction over ground truth. This study demonstrates the feasibility of rapidly determining levels of FHB in wheat spikes, which will greatly facilitate the breeding of resistant cultivars.

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/1/26/pdf

Automatic evaluation of wheat resistance to fusarium head blight using dual mask-rcnn deep learning frameworks in computer vision

In recent years, deep learning has greatly improved the ability of wheatear detection. However, there are still three main problems in wheatear detection based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms. First, dense wheat plants often overlap, and the wind direction will blur the pictures, which obviously interferes with the detection of wheatears; second, due to the different maturity, color, genotype, and head orientation, the appearance will also be different; third, UAV needs to take images in the field and conduct real-time detection, which requires the embedded module to detect wheatears quickly and accurately. Given the above problems, we studied and improved YoloV4, and proposed a robust method for wheatear detection using UAV in natural scenes. For the first problem, we modified the network structure, deleted the feature map with a size of $19\times 19$ , and used k-means algorithm to re-cluster the anchors, and we proposed a method of prediction box fusion. For the second problem, we used the pseudo-labeling method and data augmentation methods to improve the generalization ability of the model. For the third problem, we simplified the network structure, replaced the original network convolution with the improved depthwise separable convolution, and proposed an adaptive ReLU activation function to reduce the amount of calculation and speed up the calculation. The experimental results showed that our method can effectively mark the bounding of wheatears. In test sets, our method achieves 96.71% in f1-score, which is 9.61% higher than the state of the art method, and the detection speed is 23% faster than the original method. It can be concluded that our method can effectively solve the problems of wheatear detection based on the UAV platform in natural scenes.

/pdf/a-robust-method-for-wheatear-detection-using-uav-in-natural-4vel6s2bfm.pdf

A Robust Method for Wheatear Detection Using UAV in Natural Scenes

The disease infliction of the plants severely influences the yield. It alters the essence and extent of crop production cause fiscal distress. Consequently, the diagnosis of numerous plant diseases is significant to decrease the yield perdition by discovering crop infections at their earlier stages. This paper introduces a new model using mobile video image processing and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM)-Simple Recurrent Neural Network (SRNN) deep learning method for the prediction of the diseased or disinfected rice plant with dynamic learning capability. The rice plant videos captured under uncontrolled conditions in day-lighting using a mobile handset and divided into two sections for the designing and testing of LSTM-SRNN models. After shooting, the video images of the rice plant segmented using colour indexing and linear color space transformation with minimal daylight impact. Low-level spatial features; entropy, standard deviation, and fuzzy features extracted after video image segmentation. The excerpted characteristics with the composite combinations transformed in time-series datasets with the desired response. The datasets employed in the LSTM-SRNN model for progressive learning. The distinct test video features applied in LSTM-SRNN to appraise the generalization capability of the proposed system with performance analysis. The experimental outcomes of the proposed LSTM-SRNN model exhibit 99.99% prediction ability with fuzzy features. The model also presents possibilities for dynamic learning adaptability and temporal information processing to overcome the limitations of many well-known rule-based and machine learning approaches.

Prediction of diseased rice plant using video processing and LSTM-simple recurrent neural network with comparative study

Assessment of the levels of damage caused by Fusarium head blight in wheat using an improved YoloV5 method

The problem faced by one farmer can also be the problem of some other farmer in other regions. Providing information to farmers and connecting them has always been a challenge. Crowdsourcing and community building are considered as useful solutions to these challenges. However, privacy concerns and inactivity of users can make these models inefficient. To tackle these challenges, we present a cost-efficient and blockchain-based secure framework for building a community of farmers and crowdsourcing the data generated by them to help the farmers’ community. Apart from ensuring privacy and security of data, a revenue model is also incorporated to provide incentives to farmers. These incentives would act as a motivating factor for the farmers to willingly participate in the process. Through integration of a deep neural network-based model to our proposed framework, prediction of any abnormalities present within the crops and their predicted possible solutions would be much more coherent. The simulation results demonstrate that the prediction of plant pathology model is highly accurate.

A blockchain and deep neural networks-based secure framework for enhanced crop protection

Fusarium head blight (FHB) is one of the most important diseases in wheat worldwide. Evaluation and identification of effective fungicides are essential for control of FHB. However, traditional methods based on the manual disease severity assessment to evaluate the efficacy of fungicides are time-consuming and laborsome. In this study, we developed a new method to rapidly assess the severity of FHB and evaluate the efficacy of fungicide application programs. Enhanced red-green-green (RGG) images were processed from acquired raw red-green-blue (RGB) images of wheat ear samples; the images were transformed in color spaces through K-means clustering for rough segmentation of wheat ears; a random forest classifier was used with features of color, texture, geometry and vegetation index for fine segmentation of disease spots in wheat ears; a newly proposed width mutation counting algorithm was used to count wheat ears; and the disease severity of the wheat ears groups was graded and the efficacy of six fungicides was evaluated. The results show that the segmentation algorithm could segment wheat ears from a complex field background. And the counting algorithm could effectively solve the problem of wheat ear adhesion and occlusion. The average counting accuracy of all and diseased wheat ears were 93.00% and 92.64%, respectively, with the coefficients of determination (R
 2
) of 0.90 and 0.98, and the root mean square error (RMSE) of 10.56 and 7.52, respectively. The new method could accurately assess the diseased levels of wheat eat groups infected by FHB and determine the efficacy of the six fungicides evaluated. The results demonstrate a potential of using digital imaging technology to evaluate and identify effective fungicides for control of the FHB disease in wheat and other crop diseases.

/pdf/evaluation-of-efficacy-of-fungicides-for-control-of-wheat-2yexmujctb.pdf

Zhicun Wang

Papers

Evaluation of Efficacy of Fungicides for Control of Wheat Fusarium Head Blight Based on Digital Imaging

Evaluating the efficacy of fungicides for wheat scab control by combined image processing technologies