An effective object detector via diffused graphic large selective kernel with one-to-few labelling strategy for small-scaled crop diseases detection

Abstract

Amid the swift evolution of advanced technologies such as autonomous robotics, edge computing, and the Internet of Things, Intelligent Agriculture Management Systems (IAMS) have become increasingly pivotal in contemporary smart agriculture. One vital task, crop disease monitoring, significantly contributes to ensuring agricultural production quality and food supply security. However, IAMS encounters a particular challenge: due to the limited computational capacity of agricultural equipment and the scarcity of available training datasets, general detection models struggle to achieve anticipated performance in agricultural environments, especially when dealing with small-scaled targets. In this paper, we propose a diffusion learning detector named CropDetdiff, designed for disease detection in agricultural environments where training samples are limited. We have developed a backbone network based on dynamic convolutional kernels, which also embeds a graph attention network in its final stage, enhancing feature extraction capabilities for small targets. Additionally, we employ a fuzzy label assignment strategy to balance positive and negative samples and devise a new loss function, HIoU, to supervise the detection of small targets. A series of experiments on two crop disease datasets validate that CropDetDiff achieves an optimal balance between detection performance and operational efficiency. Specifically, the proposed model has achieved a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 73.2% and 40.1% on the two datasets, improving by at least 3.7% and 2.9% over other detectors, respectively, and there is a significant improvement in small targets particularly, thus achieving optimal performance. Additionally, the proposed model exhibits commendable performance in terms of parameter quantity and execution velocity. These results substantiate the efficacy and stability of CropDetDiff, underscoring its suitability for real-world applications within IAMS.