Estimation of Fusarium Head Blight Severity Based on Transfer Learning

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The recognition accuracy of traditional image recognition methods is heavily dependent on the design of complicated and tedious hand-crafted features. In view of the problems of poor accuracy and complicated feature extraction, this study presents a methodology for the estimation of the severity of wheat Fusarium head blight (FHB) with a small sample dataset based on transfer learning technology and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Firstly, we utilized the potent feature learning and feature expression capabilities of CNNs to realize the automatic learning of FHB characteristics. Using transfer learning technology, VGG16, ResNet50, and MobileNetV1 models were pre-trained on the ImageNet. The knowledge was transferred to the estimation of FHB severity, and the fully connected (FC) layer of the models was modified. Secondly, acquiring the wheat images at the peak of the outbreak of FHB as the research object, after preprocessing for size filling on the wheat images, the image dataset was expanded with operations such as mirror flip, rotation transformation, and superimposed noise to improve the performance of the model and reduce the overfitting of models. Finally, under the Tensorflow deep learning framework, the VGG16, ResNet50, and MobileNetV1 models were subjected to transfer learning. The results showed that in the case of transfer learning and data augmentation, the ResNet50 model in Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1 score was better than the other two models, giving the highest accuracy of 98.42% and F1 score of 97.86%. The ResNet50 model had the highest recognition accuracy, providing technical support and reference for the accurate recognition of FHB.