Multi-label learning for crop leaf diseases recognition and severity estimation based on convolutional neural networks

Crop diseases have always been a dilemma as it can cause significant diminution in both quality and quantity of agricultural yields. Thus, automatic recognition and severity estimation of crop diseases on leaves plays a crucial role in agricultural sector. In this paper, we propose a series of automatic image-based crop leaf diseases recognition and severity estimation networks, i.e., BR-CNNs, which can simultaneously recognize crop species, classify crop diseases and estimate crop diseases severity based on deep learning. BR-CNNs based on binary relevance (BR) multi-label learning algorithm and deep convolutional neural network (CNN) approaches succeed in identifying 7 crop species, 10 crop diseases types (including Healthy) and 3 crop diseases severity kinds (normal, general and serious). Compared with LP-CNNs and MLP-CNNs, the overall performance of BR-CNNs is superior. The BR-CNN based on ResNet50 achieves the best test accuracy of 86.70%, which demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of our network. The BR-CNN based on the light-weight NasNet also achieves excellent test accuracy of 85.28%, which can provide more possibilities for the development of mobile systems and devices.