VddNet: Vine Disease Detection Network Based on Multispectral Images and Depth Map

Abstract

Vine pathologies generate several economic and environmental problems, causing serious difficulties for the viticultural activity. The early detection of vine disease can significantly improve the control of vine diseases and avoid spread of virus or fungi. Currently, remote sensing and artificial intelligence technologies are emerging in the field of precision agriculture. They offer interesting potential for crop disease management. However, despite the advances in these technologies, particularly deep learning technologies, many problems still present considerable challenges, such as semantic segmentation of images for disease mapping. In this paper, we present a new deep learning architecture called Vine Disease Detection Network (VddNet). It is based on three parallel auto-encoders integrating different information (i.e., visible, infrared and depth). Then, the decoder reconstructs and retrieves the features, and assigns a class to each output pixel. An orthophotos registration method is also proposed to align the three types of images and enable the processing by VddNet. The proposed architecture is assessed by comparing it with the most known architectures: SegNet, U-Net, DeepLabv3+ and PSPNet. The deep learning architectures were trained on multispectral data from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and depth map information extracted from 3D processing. The results of the proposed architecture show that the VddNet architecture achieves higher scores than the baseline methods. Moreover, this study demonstrates that the proposed method has many advantages compared to methods that directly use the UAV images.