Infield disease detection in citrus plants: integrating semantic segmentation and dynamic deep learning object detection model for enhanced agricultural yield

Simultaneous and dynamic detection of diseases from infield images of citrus plants is the primary objective of this investigation. Refraining from discarding the disease-related issues would reduce agricultural yield and production, resulting in significant crop loss and economic instability. Computer Vision offers an inexpensive and efficient solution for detecting and predicting multiple diseases from infield images of citrus plants in various stages of plant growth. This study aims to perform simultaneous detection and prediction of cankers, mites, and nutritional deficiencies from infield images of citrus plants. For this purpose, over 4914 samples are annotated that are obtained from 441 image samples collected from orchards of citrus plants. Initially, the input image is subject to preprocessing followed by segmentation of prominent leaf regions and disease prediction. Contributions investigated in this work are two-fold: a deep semantic segmentation model named Dynamic U-Net is employed to extract prominent regions of interest, and a dynamic, lightweight object detection deep learning model for predicting diseases. From experimental outcomes, the segmentation efficiency is found to be 89.07% foreground accuracy, 0.7881 of IoU, and 0.9188 of the Dice coefficient. The object detection performance is quantified using the mapped metric, resulting in 0.85, 0.71, 0.64, and 0.27 efficiency concerning plant diseases, cankers, mites, and nutritional deficiency. As per the findings, the proposed approach is an effective solution to perform automated detection and prediction from infield images of citrus plants. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2024.