Automatic Classification Service System for Citrus Pest Recognition Based on Deep Learning

Plant diseases are a major cause of reduction in agricultural output, which leads to severe economic losses and unstable food supply. The citrus plant is an economically important fruit crop grown and produced worldwide. However, citrus plants are easily affected by various factors, such as climate change, pests, and diseases, resulting in reduced yield and quality. Advances in computer vision in recent years have been widely used for plant disease detection and classification, providing opportunities for early disease detection, and resulting in improvements in agriculture. Particularly, the early and accurate detection of citrus diseases, which are vulnerable to pests, is very important to prevent the spread of pests and reduce crop damage. Research on citrus pest disease is ongoing, but it is difficult to apply research results to cultivation owing to a lack of datasets for research and limited types of pests. In this study, we built a dataset by self-collecting a total of 20,000 citrus pest images, including fruits and leaves, from actual cultivation sites. The constructed dataset was trained, verified, and tested using a model that had undergone five transfer learning steps. All models used in the experiment had an average accuracy of 97% or more and an average f1 score of 96% or more. We built a web application server using the EfficientNet-b0 model, which exhibited the best performance among the five learning models. The built web application tested citrus pest disease using image samples collected from websites other than the self-collected image samples and prepared data, and both samples correctly classified the disease. The citrus pest automatic diagnosis web system using the model proposed in this study plays a useful auxiliary role in recognizing and classifying citrus diseases. This can, in turn, help improve the overall quality of citrus fruits.