Plant leaf infected spot segmentation using robust encoder-decoder cascaded deep learning model

Leaf infection detection and diagnosis at an earlier stage can improve agricultural output and reduce monetary costs. An inaccurate segmentation may degrade the accuracy of disease classification due to some different and complex leaf diseases. Also, the disease's adhesion and dimension can overlap, causing partial under-segmentation. Therefore, a novel robust Deep Encoder-Decoder Cascaded Network (DEDCNet) model is proposed in this manuscript for leaf image segmentation that precisely segments the diseased leaf spots and differentiates similar diseases. This model is comprised of an Infected Spot Recognition Network and an Infected Spot Segmentation Network. Initially, ISRN is designed by integrating cascaded CNN with a Feature Pyramid Pooling layer to identify the infected leaf spot and avoid an impact of background details. After that, the ISSN developed using an encoder-decoder network, which uses a multi-scale dilated convolution kernel to precisely segment the infected leaf spot. Moreover, the resultant leaf segments are provided to the pre-learned CNN models to learn texture features followed by the SVM algorithm to categorize leaf disease classes. The ODEDCNet delivers exceptional performance on both the Betel Leaf Image and PlantVillage datasets. On the Betel Leaf Image dataset, it achieves an accuracy of 94.89%, with high precision (94.35%), recall (94.77%), and F-score (94.56%), while maintaining low under-segmentation (6.2%) and over-segmentation rates (2.8%). It also achieves a remarkable Dice coefficient of 0.9822, all in just 0.10 seconds. On the PlantVillage dataset, the ODEDCNet outperforms other existing models with an accuracy of 96.5%, demonstrating high precision (96.61%), recall (96.5%), and F-score (96.56%). It excels in reducing under-segmentation to just 3.12% and over-segmentation to 2.56%. Furthermore, it achieves a Dice coefficient of 0.9834 in a mere 0.09 seconds. It evident for the greater efficiency on both segmentation and categorization of leaf diseases contrasted with the existing models.