PLD-Det: plant leaf disease detection in real time using an end-to-end neural network approach based on improved YOLOv7

Abstract

In order to maintain sustainable agriculture, it is vital to monitor plant health. Since all species of plants are prone to characteristic diseases, it necessitates regular surveillance to search for any symptoms, which is utterly challenging and time-consuming. Besides, farmers may struggle to identify the type of plant disease and its potential symptoms. Hence, the interest in research like image-based computer-aided automated plant leaf disease detection by analyzing the early symptoms has increased enormously. However, limitations in the plant leaf image database, for instance, unfitting backgrounds, blurry images, and so on, sometimes cause underprivileged feature extraction, misclassification, and overfitting issues in existing models. As a result, we have proposed a real-time plant leaf disease detection architecture incorporating proposed PLD-Det model, which is based on improved YOLOv7 with the intention of assisting farmers while reducing the issues in existing models. The architecture has been trained on the widely used PlantVillage dataset, which resulted in an accuracy of 98.53%. Furthermore, SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) values have been analyzed as a unified measure of feature significance. According to the experimental findings, the proposed PLD-Det model, which is an improved YOLOv7 architecture, outperformed the original YOLOv7 model in test accuracy by approximately 4%.