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High-Throughput Robotic Phenotyping for Quantifying Tomato Disease Severity Enabled by Synthetic Data and Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation
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  • Weilong He,
  • Xingjian Li,
  • Zhenghua Zhang,
  • Yuxi Chen,
  • Jianbo Zhang,
  • Dilip R. Panthee,
  • Inga Meadows,
  • Lirong Xiang
Weilong He
NC State University Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering
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Xingjian Li
NC Plant Science Initiative
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Zhenghua Zhang
NC State University Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering
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Yuxi Chen
NC State University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Jianbo Zhang
NC State University Department of Horticultural Science
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Dilip R. Panthee
NC State University Department of Horticultural Science
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Inga Meadows
NC State University Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology
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Lirong Xiang
NC State University Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering

Corresponding Author:lxiang3@ncsu.edu

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Abstract

Plant diseases cause an annual global crop loss of 20-40%, leading to estimated economic losses of 30-50 billion dollars. Tomatoes are susceptible to more than 200 diseases. Breeding disease-resistant cultivars is more cost-effective and environmentally sustainable than the frequent use of pesticides. Traditional breeding methods for disease resistance, relying on direct visual observation to measure disease-related traits, are time-consuming, inaccurate, expensive, and require specific knowledge of tomato diseases. High-throughput disease phenotyping is essential to reduce labor costs, improve measurement accuracy, and expedite the release of new varieties, thereby more effectively identifying disease-resistant crops. Precision agriculture efforts have primarily focused on detecting diseases on individual tomato leaves under controlled laboratory conditions, neglecting the assessment of disease severity of the entire plant in the field. To address this, we created a synthetic dataset using existing field and individual leaf datasets, leveraging a game engine to minimize additional data labeling. Consequently, we developed a customized unsupervised domain-adaptive tomato disease segmentation algorithm that monitors the entire tomato plant and determines disease severity based on the proportion of affected leaf areas. The system-derived disease percentages show a high correlation with manually labeled data, evidenced by a correlation coefficient of 0.91. Our research demonstrates the feasibility of using ground robots equipped with deep-learning algorithms to monitor tomato disease severity under field conditions, potentially accelerating the automation and standardization of whole-plant disease severity monitoring in tomatoes. This high-throughput disease phenotyping system can also be adapted to analyze diseases in other crops with similar foliar diseases, such as maize, soybeans, and cotton.
05 Aug 2024Submitted to Journal of Field Robotics
07 Aug 2024Submission Checks Completed
07 Aug 2024Assigned to Editor
07 Aug 2024Review(s) Completed, Editorial Evaluation Pending
27 Aug 2024Reviewer(s) Assigned
05 Oct 2024Editorial Decision: Revise Minor
16 Oct 20241st Revision Received
17 Oct 2024Review(s) Completed, Editorial Evaluation Pending
17 Oct 2024Submission Checks Completed
17 Oct 2024Assigned to Editor
22 Oct 2024Reviewer(s) Assigned
03 Nov 2024Editorial Decision: Accept