Towards Cloud-Native, Machine Learning Based Detection of Crop Disease
with Imaging Spectroscopy
Abstract
Developing actionable early detection and warning systems for
agricultural stakeholders is crucial to reduce the annual
\$200B USD losses and environmental impacts associated
with crop diseases. Agricultural stakeholders primarily rely on
labor-intensive, expensive scouting and molecular testing to detect
disease. Spectroscopic imagery (SI) can improve plant disease management
by offering decision-makers accurate risk maps derived from Machine
Learning (ML) models. However, training and deploying ML requires
significant computation and storage capabilities. This challenge will
become even greater as global scale data from the forthcoming Surface
Biology \& Geology (SBG) satellite becomes available.
This work presents a cloud-hosted architecture to streamline plant
disease detection with SI from NASA’s AVIRIS-NG platform, using
grapevine leafroll associated virus complex 3 (GLRaV-3) as a model
system. Here, we showcase a pipeline for processing SI to produce plant
disease detection models and demonstrate that the underlying principles
of a cloud-based disease detection system easily accommodate model
improvements and shifting data modalities. Our goal is to make the
insights derived from SI available to agricultural stakeholders via a
platform designed with their needs and values in mind. The key outcome
of this work is an innovative, responsive system foundation that can
empower agricultural stakeholders to make data-driven plant disease
management decisions, while serving as a framework for others pursuing
use-inspired application development for agriculture to follow that
ensures social impact and reproducibility while preserving stakeholder
privacy.