LeafNST: an improved data augmentation method for classification of plant disease using object-based neural style transfer

Abstract

Plant diseases significantly threaten global agriculture, impacting crop yield and food security. Nearly 30% of the crop yield is lost due to plant diseases. Efficient identification and classification of plant diseases through computer vision techniques have become imperative for timely intervention. However, popular plant disease datasets often suffer from data imbalance, with certain classes underrepresented, hindering the performance of machine learning models. Traditional data augmentation methods, such as rotation and flipping, are limited in their effectiveness, especially when faced with imbalanced datasets. To address this limitation, we explore advanced data augmentation techniques, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) such as CycleGAN and LeafGAN, which have shown promise in generating synthetic images. However, we propose an innovative approach of Object-based single Style Transfer on a single neural network for augmenting the plant disease dataset. This technique focuses on mitigating data imbalance issues within datasets, which can adversely affect the model’s ability to generalize across diverse classes. The proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art data augmentation techniques, highlighting its superiority in addressing data imbalance issues. Our approach aims to produce more realistic and diverse synthetic images, leading to improved model generalization and accuracy in plant disease classification tasks validated using different classifiers. The efficiency of our approach is validated through extensive experimentation and benchmarking against existing methods.