A Dual Branch Fusion Network for Simultaneous Tea Leaf Disease Diagnosis and Age-Based Quality Grade Evaluation.

Abstract

The simultaneous diagnosis of diseases and evaluation of age quality grades in tea leaves are critical for precision agriculture and the economic valuation of tea products. Although deep learning has shown promise in agricultural vision tasks, current multi-task models often suffer from performance degradation due to feature conflicts: tea leaf disease recognition relies heavily on macro-structural lesions, whereas tea leaf-age quality grading depends on micro-textural features such as trichome density and color uniformity. To address this discrepancy, we propose a novel dual branch fusion network. Our architecture fundamentally decouples the feature extraction process by utilizing a dual branch mechanism. The first branch employs global average pooling to capture first-order spatial statistics; it can retain the global structural layout necessary for macro-lesion detection. The second branch introduces a dimensionality-reduced self-bilinear pooling module to compute second-order covariance matrices; it can effectively capture the fine-grained textural patterns essential for micro-grade classification. These decoupled features are subsequently fused and optimized through a weighted multi-task loss function. Experimental results on a comprehensive tea leaf dataset demonstrate that the proposed dual fusion framework significantly outperforms baseline models. The proposed network can rescue the disease classification accuracy drop observed in standard bilinear models while maintaining exceptional grading performance. Furthermore, the proposed network maintains a compact parameter footprint and low computational complexity. This balance renders it suitable for deployment on agricultural Internet of Things edge devices where inference speed is critical.

Plant phenotyping relevance

茶葉の病害状態と葉齢品質を画像から推定する深層学習手法を開発し、データセット上でベースラインと比較評価しており、表現型取得・推定法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's Data Availability Statement publicly releases the two tea leaf image datasets used for its phenotyping tasks (disease recognition and leaf-age quality grading) via Mendeley Data. The authors' analysis code and trained models are only promised 'upon acceptance' with no public URL, so they do not qualify.