PND-Net: plant nutrition deficiency and disease classification using graph convolutional network

Crop yield production could be enhanced for agricultural growth if various plant nutrition deficiencies, and diseases are identified and detected at early stages. Hence, continuous health monitoring of plant is very crucial for handling plant stress. 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. Furthermore, 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), has been evaluated on two public datasets for nutrition deficiency, and two for disease classification using four backbone CNNs. The best classification performances of the proposed PND-Net are as follows: (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 40