Many applications for the automated diagnosis of plant disease have been developed based on the success of deep learning techniques. However, these applications often suffer from overfitting, and the diagnostic performance is drastically decreased when used on test datasets from new environments. The typical reasons for this are that the symptoms to be detected are unclear or faint, and there are limitations related to data diversity. In this paper, we propose LeafGAN, a novel image-to-image translation system with own attention mechanism. LeafGAN generates a wide variety of diseased images via transformation from healthy images, as a data augmentation tool for improving the performance of plant disease diagnosis. Thanks to its own attention mechanism, our model can transform only relevant areas from images with a variety of backgrounds, thus enriching the versatility of the training images. Experiments with five-class cucumber disease classification show that data augmentation with vanilla CycleGAN cannot help to improve the generalization, i.e. disease diagnostic performance increased by only 0.7% from the baseline. In contrast, LeafGAN boosted the diagnostic performance by 7.4%. We also visually confirmed the generated images by our LeafGAN were much better quality and more convincing than those generated by vanilla CycleGAN.

本文提出了一种新型图像转换系统 LeafGAN，具有自己的注意力机制，能够生成各种病态植物图像，作为数据增强工具来提高植物病害诊断的性能。通过五类黄瓜病的分类实验，证明了使用 LeafGan 进行数据增强能够显著提高病害诊断性能，比原先基准提高了 7.4%，生成的图像质量也比传统的 CycleGAN 更好。

LeafGAN：用于实际植物病害诊断的有效数据增强方法