QUANTIFYING BIOTIC DAMAGE ON PLANTS, BY SEPARATING PLANT-IMAGES AND SUBSEQUENTLY OPERATING A CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORK

In performing a computer-implemented method to quantify biotic damage in leaves of crop-plants, the computer receives a plant-image (410) showing a crop-plant, showing the aerial part of the plant, with stem, branches, and leaves and showing the ground on that the plant is placed. A segmenter module obtains a segmented plant-image being a contiguous set of pixels that shows in a contour (460A) of the aerial part, the contour (460A) having a margin region (458) that shows the ground partially. The computer uses convolutional neural network that processing the segmented plant-image by regression to obtain a damage degree, the convolutional neural network having been trained by processing damage-annotated segmented plant-images.