Data-centric annotation analysis for plant disease detection: Strategy, consistency, and performance.

Abstract

Object detection models have become the current tool of choice for plant disease detection in precision agriculture. Most existing research improved the performance by ameliorating networks and optimizing the loss function. However, because of the vast influence of data annotation quality and the cost of annotation, the data-centric part of a project also needs more investigation. We should further consider the relationship between data annotation strategies, annotation quality, and the model's performance. In this paper, a systematic strategy with four annotation strategies for plant disease detection is proposed: local, semi-global, global, and symptom-adaptive annotation. Labels with different annotation strategies will result in distinct models' performance, and their contrasts are remarkable. An interpretability study of the annotation strategy is conducted by using class activation maps. In addition, we define five types of inconsistencies in the annotation process and investigate the severity of the impact of inconsistent labels on model's performance. Finally, we discuss the problem of label inconsistency during data augmentation. Overall, this data-centric quantitative analysis helps us to understand the significance of annotation strategies, which provides practitioners a way to obtain higher performance and reduce annotation costs on plant disease detection. Our work encourages researchers to pay more attention to annotation consistency and the essential issues of annotation strategy. The code will be released at: https://github.com/JiuqingDong/PlantDiseaseDetection_Yolov5 .

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物病害の画像検出におけるアノテーション戦略・一貫性とモデル性能を体系的に評価する手法研究であり、植物の病徴・病害状態の抽出方法が中心的である。

Code and data availability

The paper's authors explicitly state a public GitHub repository for the plant disease detection analysis code (YOLOv5-based annotation strategy/consistency experiments). No separate phenotype dataset deposit by the authors is stated; cited datasets (PlantVillage, etc.) are prior work.