Towards Improved Performance on Plant Disease Recognition with Symptoms Specific Annotation

Object detection models have become the current tool of choice for plant disease detection in precision agriculture. Most existing research improves the performance by ameliorating networks and optimizing the loss function. However, the data-centric part of a whole project also needs more investigation. In this paper, we proposed a systematic strategy with three different annotation methods for plant disease detection: local, semi-global, and global label. Experimental results on our paprika disease dataset show that a single class annotation with semi-global boxes may improve accuracy. In addition, we also studied the noise factor during the labeling process. An ablation study shows that annotation noise within 10% is acceptable for keeping good performance. Overall, this data-centric numerical analysis helps us to understand the significance of annotation methods, which provides practitioners a way to obtain higher performance and reduce annotation costs on plant disease detection tasks. Our work encourages researchers to pay more attention to label quality and the essential issues of labeling methods.