Leaf Spot Attention Networks Based on Spot Feature Encoding for Leaf Disease Identification and Detection

This study proposes a new attention-enhanced YOLO model that incorporates a leaf spot attention mechanism based on regions-of-interest (ROI) feature extraction into the YOLO framework for leaf disease detection. Inspired by a previous study, which revealed that leaf spot attention based on the ROI-aware feature extraction can improve leaf disease recognition accuracy significantly and outperform state-of-the-art deep learning models, this study extends the leaf spot attention model to leaf disease detection. The primary idea is that spot areas indicating leaf diseases appear only in leaves, whereas the background area does not contain useful information regarding leaf diseases. To increase the discriminative power of the feature extractor that is required in the object detection framework, it is essential to extract informative and discriminative features from the spot and leaf areas. To realize this, a new ROI-aware feature extractor, that is, a spot feature extractor was designed. To divide the leaf image into spot, leaf, and background areas, the leaf segmentation module was first pretrained, and then spot feature encoding was applied to encode spot information. Next, the ROI-aware feature extractor was connected to an ROI-aware feature fusion layer to model the leaf spot attention mechanism, and to be joined with the YOLO detection subnetwork. The experimental results confirm that the proposed ROI-aware feature extractor can improve leaf disease detection by boosting the discriminative power of the spot features. In addition, the proposed attention-enhanced YOLO model outperforms conventional state-of-the-art object detection models.