LeafGAN: An Effective Data Augmentation Method for Practical Plant Disease Diagnosis

Many applications for the automated diagnosis of plant disease have been developed based on the success of deep learning techniques. However, these applications often suffer from overfitting, and the diagnostic performance is drastically decreased when used on test data sets from new environments. In this article, we propose LeafGAN, a novel image-to-image translation system with own attention mechanism. LeafGAN generates a wide variety of diseased images via transformation from healthy images, as a data augmentation tool for improving the performance of plant disease diagnosis. Due to its own attention mechanism, our model can transform only relevant areas from images with a variety of backgrounds, thus enriching the versatility of the training images. Experiments with five-class cucumber disease classification show that data augmentation with vanilla CycleGAN cannot help to improve the generalization, i.e., disease diagnostic performance increased by only 0.7% from the baseline. In contrast, LeafGAN boosted the diagnostic performance by 7.4%. We also visually confirmed that the generated images by our LeafGAN were much better quality and more convincing than those generated by vanilla CycleGAN. The code is available publicly at https://github.com/IyatomiLab/LeafGAN. Note to Practitioners Automated plant disease diagnosis systems play an important role in the agricultural automation field. Building a practical image-based automatic plant diagnosis system requires collecting a wide variety of disease images with reliable label information. However, it is quite labor-intensive. Conventional systems have reported relatively high diagnosis performance, but most of their scores were largely biased due to the “latent similarity” between training and test images, and their true diagnosis capabilities were much lower than claimed. To address this issue, we propose LeafGAN, which generates countless diverse and high-quality training images; it works as an efficient data augmentation for the diagnosis classifier. Such generated images can be used as useful resources for improving the performance of the cucumber disease diagnosis systems.