2022 3rd International Conference on Computer Vision, Image and Deep Learning & International Conference on Computer
Engineering and Applications (CVIDL & ICCEA)
Application research of plant leaf pests and diseases
base on unsupervised learning
2022 3rd International Conference on Computer Vision, Image and Deep Learning & International Conference on Computer Engineering and Applications (CVIDL & ICCEA) | 978-1-6654-5911-2/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/CVIDLICCEA56201.2022.9824321
Mingjing Pei*
School of Information Engineering, West Anhui University
Lu,an, China
363375362@qq.com
Maosheng Fu
School of Information Engineering, West Anhui University
Lu,an, China
49593838@qq.com
Zusong Li
School of Information Engineering, West Anhui University
Lu,an, China
67202167@qq.com
Abstract—In agricultural productivity, detecting plant pests
and diseases is extremely crucial. This research studies images of
plant leaf pests and diseases from an unsupervised perspective to
solve the problem that existing plant leaf disease datasets are
difficult to acquire and include few types of diseases, and they
cannot find the defective parts of leaves. This paper utilizes the
idea of image restoration and uses a deep learning correlation
model to detect and localize the abnormal regions of plant leaves.
The experimental results show that the img_AUCROC and
pixel_AUCROC level anomaly detection and localization achieve
good results, which bring influence and reference to other peers.
Keywords- plant leaf pests and diseases; unsupervised learning;
anomaly detection
I. INTRODUCTION
Plant disease target detection is the application of computer
vision technology to detect plant disease infested areas and their
specific positions in complicated natural settings[1], which is
required for accurate categorization and identification of plant
diseases, as well as assessment of disease damage severity. It's
also required for correct plant disease categorization and
diagnosis, as well as disease damage assessment and accurate
location of disease regions[2]. The key to early diagnosis and
intelligent disease monitoring is the accurate detection and
identification of plant diseases. It is the foundation of accurate
pest treatment and information management, as well as the key
to early illness detection and intelligent monitoring.
The majority of plant pests and diseases are currently
detected using supervised methods, but this method necessitates
the collection of a huge number of pest and disease data, as well
as a significant amount of people to label the data, both of which
are time-consuming and labor-intensive. We apply an
unsupervised method in this research to consider the
identification of abnormal areas on plant pest and disease leaves,
and we simply need a significant number of normal sample data
without labeling. Existing methods based on the self-supervised
approach to identify normal samples from abnormal samples by
synthesizing aberrant samples and training a binary classifier
978-1-6654-5911-2/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE
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Min Kong
School of Information Engineering, West Anhui University
Lu,an, China
mkong@wxc.edu.cn
Xiancun Zhou
School of Information Engineering, West Anhui University
Lu,an, China
Zhouxc106@163.com
Jieru Xu
School of Information Engineering, West Anhui University
Lu,an, China
9182783@qq.com
exist, however, the synthesized samples are still a long way
from being accurate[3][4]. Another way is to extract features
from a large number of normal samples and then identify
whether they are normal or abnormal by distance[5][6],
however, the accuracy is low[7]. We employ image restoration
to detect abnormalities in images in this paper, which is more
effective and has good generality, by contextualizing and
restoring mask regions[8][9][10].
The main contributions of this paper are as follows:
First, the detection of abnormal regions of plant leaves is by
unsupervised method, which saves a lot of labor and does not
require labeled data.
Second, the restoration of mask regions is performed by the
idea of image restoration.
II. RELATED WORK
Reconstruction-based anomaly detection locates the
anomalous region by compressing the original image first, then
recovering it, and finally by comparing the before and after
images. Common ones such as self-encoder, GAN, etc. This
model usually has poor recovery in terms of detailsbut has
better performance in generalizing to other datasets. The
literature [11]developed a multi-scale area feature generator
that uses a pre-trained neural network to extract image features
and then reconstructs the feature map at the feature level. The
model employs the transforming architecture to reconstruct the
image by masking a patch area of the image and then
reconstructing it by surrounding it with that region in
literature[12].
Embedding-based anomaly detection is to determine
whether an image is abnormal by the distance between the
image features of a large number of normal samples and the
features of the test sample images. The literature [13]divides the
image into many small patches, maps the patches to a centroid
attachment through the network during training, and calculates
the anomaly score based on the distance from the patches to the
centroid during testing. According to the literature [14],
 anomaly scores are calculated using feature extraction from To train the autoencoder, three loss functions were used for
normal sample images, Gaussian modeling of feature vectors in the experiments, namely L2 loss, a multi-scale gradient seismic
the feature layer, and probability distribution of test sample similarity (MSGMS) loss, and structured similarity index
feature vectors. (SSIM) loss, the formula is shown below.
Self-supervised learning is aim to develop a task by
ourselves, which is equivalent to a supervised signal, and then L   G LG   S LS  L2 (1)
help the model learn useful features for the downstream task. H W
1
The literature [15] proposes extracting a random patch of the
image and pasting it at any location on the image to create an Ls（I , Ir）
NP
1  SSIM ( I , I )
i 1 j 1
r (i , j ) (2)
anomalous sample, which can then be identified by a binary
classification network before moving on to the downstream task.
III. METHOD
LG I , Ir  
1 4 1 H l WL
 1  GMS I 1, Irl （i, j )
4 l 1 Nl i 1 j 1
  (3)

In this paper, we use a framework based on the idea of 2g( I )g( Ir )  c

image based reconstruction for anomaly detection of plant leaf GMS ( I , Ir） 2 2 (4)
pest and disease regions[8]. The flow chart of the overall g ( I )  g ( Ir)  c
framework is shown in Figure 1.
s and g are the hyper parameter, I r stands for image
restoration, c is a constants.

Figure 1 Flow chart of the overall framework of method
To begin, the image is divided into several little patches by
the size of k , which can be 2, 4, 8, 16, or other numbers.
Second, the image is masked into patches and repeated n times
to produce n masked images, the intersection of the masked
patches in these n "stump maps" is empty, i.e., each patch is
guaranteed to be masked, and the image is then rebuilt in the
next procedure. Following that, it is reassembled in post-
processing. Finally, the reconstruction network receives the n
masked images for reconstruction.
The size of the region being discarded during inference
affects the accuracy of region reconstruction. Because anomaly
detection relies on reconstructing non-anomalous regions as
accurately as feasible, performance may be influenced by the
size of the region used, k , as well as the size of the anomaly
being reconstructed. If k is substantially greater than the
anomaly, precise repair reconstruction is necessary. The repair
network can use the surrounding area to figure out which
component of the anomaly is causing the problem. As
anomalies come in various sizes, their identification must take
into account a variety of scales. An accurate map of
reconstruction effects can be constructed by considering
numerous reconstructions of a single image generated using
multiple values of k . The recovery reconstruction network
employed in this paper is a U-Net encoder-decoder model with
a ResNet-like Skip Connection between the shallow and deep
layers.
IV. EXPERIMENTS
A. Dateset
We used a set of sample plant leaf datasets that we had on
hand. Our collection of plant leaf samples was used in the
experiment. Normal samples and three types of faulty samples
are grouped into four categories in the plant leaf dataset. There
are more than 100 samples in normal and ten faulty samples in
the other, and the relevant samples are depicted in figure 2. The
first row displays normal samples, gray spot disease leaf are
exhibited in the second row, the third row reveals brown spot
disease, and the last depicts human-damaged leaves.
Figure 2 Plant leaf dataset
B. Results
To detect the abnormal region of the leaf, the experiments
were run on an Intel Core i9 processor with a GeForce RTX
2070s GPU, and the code was written under the Ubuntu
18.04+CUDA 10.2+CUDNN+PyTorch environment. The
experimental learning rate was set to 0.0001, and 150 epochs
were performed. The network is trained using Adam optimizer
with S and G are set to 1. Due to the GPU's limited memory,
the input batch size was set to 1, and 100 batches were
processed in each epoch, with an average running time of
roughly 250 seconds for each epoch. Each batch takes roughly
2.5 seconds to run on average.

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 The experimental training process is mostly used to update
parameters, change the weight value of the model, and evaluate
good and bad model training using the AUC value, which is the
total area under the ROC curve .The higher the False Positive
Rate (FPR), the more abnormal data are present in data that is
measured as normal; the higher the True Positive Rate (TPR),
the more normal data are present in data that is anticipated to be
normal. As a result, the higher the TPR and the lower the FPR,
the better, which is reflected in the AUC value, which is higher
than the AUC value. The best results obtained from model
training are judged by comparing the AUC values obtained
experimentally under different parameter conditions.
Figure 3, it depicts the change in AUC value during the
training process. when the model accepts different threshold
values, the leaf img_ROCAUC and pixel_ROCAUC values
continue to rise, reaching a maximum of 0.953, indicating that
the model is properly applied and can efficiently detect
anomalous regions in the leaves. Figure 4 shows the results of
the model training loss function transformation curve, which
includes L1 loss, SSIM loss, and GMS loss.
Figure 5 the detect result of normal and abnormal plant leaf

The experimental results of testing on the test dataset are

shown in Figure 5, showing four categories of effect pictures,
respectively, gray spot disease leaves, human-damaged leaves,
normal pictures, and brown spot disease leaves. The first
column is the original test set image, the effect map by
reconstruction algorithm lies in the second column, the third
column is Ground Truth, the predicted heat map is generated in
the fourth column, the fifth column represents the predicted
mask map, and the last column is the segmentation effect
performed on the original image. The higher the chance of an
abnormal image, the redder the color of the region of the graph;
conversely, the higher the probability of a normal image, the
bluer the hue. The first and second row images can detect and
segment the abnormal region, while the third row is a normal
image, and the testing effect is also relatively excellent,
Figure 3 the value of leaf img_ROCAUC and pixel_ROCAUC
effectively hiding the aberrant region. However, as illustrated
in the fourth row, the detecting result is less satisfactory when
a substantial section of the image is aberrant.
V. CONCLUSION
Plant leaf diseases and pests are investigated in this research
using a unsupervised learning approach. On the one hand, a
huge amount of pest and disease data does not need to be
labeled, and only a large number of normal samples need to be
collected, reducing labor consumption. On the other hand, the
location of plant leaf damage is located, delivering relevant and
crucial information to workers and plant experts.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the
Natural Science Key Project of Anhui Provincial Education
Department(No.KJ2020A0636,
Figure 4 the curve change of three kinds of loss with epoch
No.KJ2021A0937,NO.KJ2020A0623), Academic funding
project of Anhui Provincial Department of Education for
University Top-notch Talents（No.gxbjZD2020084）, Natural
science school-level key projects of the west University of
Anhui (No.WXZR201928, No.WXZR202016) and the Big
Data Project of West Mountain Pharmacy(No.20201226).

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