Online Identification Method of Tea Diseases in Complex Natural Environments

An intelligent Internet-of-Things (IoT) hardware system in the field tea plantations was built, comprising collection of tea images by HD zoom cameras in a cluster structure and deployment of the detection model by cluster-head edge computing nodes. Data was sent to customer premise equipment through edge nodes and gateways and then to cloud platforms, which provided a hardware platform for identifying remote tea disease online. Field-placed cameras were used as the main acquisition means to study various diseases on Yashixiang, a typical variety of Chaozhou Dancong tea, in different seasons and weather conditions and shooting angles in a natural year period with complex backgrounds. In turn, we constructed a natural environment high-quality dataset covering major diseases e.g., tea anthracnose, tea leaf blight, tea grey blight, Pseudocercospora theae, etc. and explored the feasibility of deep learning algorithms for automatic identification of Chaozhou Dancong tea diseases. Results showed that the recognition rate of Swim Transformer reached 94% in complex natural environments. This paper demonstrated the effectiveness of the dataset and the feasibility of deep learning algorithms applied to the automatic identification of diseases of Chaozhou Dancong tea, laying a foundation for the practical application of the technology in complex natural environments.