PND-Net: Plant Nutrition Deficiency and Disease Classification using Graph Convolutional Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces PND-Net, a novel graph convolutional network that enhances plant disease and nutrient deficiency classification by integrating regional feature learning and multi-scale spatial pooling, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Contribution

The paper proposes PND-Net, combining CNNs with GCNs and spatial pyramidal pooling for improved accuracy in plant health diagnosis, outperforming existing methods on multiple datasets.

Findings

Achieved up to 90.54% accuracy in plant nutrition deficiency classification.

Achieved up to 96.18% accuracy in potato disease classification.

State-of-the-art performance on histopathology and cervical cancer datasets.

Abstract

Crop yield production could be enhanced for agricultural growth if various plant nutrition deficiencies, and diseases are identified and detected at early stages. The deep learning methods have proven its superior performances in the automated detection of plant diseases and nutrition deficiencies from visual symptoms in leaves. This article proposes a new deep learning method for plant nutrition deficiencies and disease classification using a graph convolutional network (GNN), added upon a base convolutional neural network (CNN). Sometimes, a global feature descriptor might fail to capture the vital region of a diseased leaf, which causes inaccurate classification of disease. To address this issue, regional feature learning is crucial for a holistic feature aggregation. In this work, region-based feature summarization at multi-scales is explored using spatial pyramidal pooling for discriminative feature representation. A GCN is developed to capacitate learning of finer details for classifying plant diseases and insufficiency of nutrients. The proposed method, called Plant Nutrition Deficiency and Disease Network (PND-Net), is evaluated on two public datasets for nutrition deficiency, and two for disease classification using four CNNs. The best classification performances are: (a) 90.00% Banana and 90.54% Coffee nutrition deficiency; and (b) 96.18% Potato diseases and 84.30% on PlantDoc datasets using Xception backbone. Furthermore, additional experiments have been carried out for generalization, and the proposed method has achieved state-of-the-art performances on two public datasets, namely the Breast Cancer Histopathology Image Classification (BreakHis 40X: 95.50%, and BreakHis 100X: 96.79% accuracy) and Single cells in Pap smear images for cervical cancer classification (SIPaKMeD: 99.18% accuracy). Also, PND-Net achieves improved performances using five-fold cross validation.