Novel Category Discovery in Plant Species and Disease Identification through Knowledge Distillation

Novel Category Discovery in Plant Species and Disease Identification through Knowledge Distillation

Identifying plant species and diseases is crucial for maintaining biodiversity and achieving optimal crop yields, making it a topic of significant practical importance. Recent studies have extended plant disease recognition from traditional closed-set scenarios to open-set environments, where the goal is to reject samples that do not belong to known categories. However, in open-world tasks, it is essential not only to define unknown samples as “unknown” but also to classify them further. This task assumes that images and labels of known categories are available and that samples of unknown categories can be accessed. The model classifies unknown samples by learning the prior knowledge of known categories. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing research on this topic in plant-related recognition tasks. To address this gap, this paper utilizes knowledge distillation to model the category space relationships between known and unknown categories. Specifically, we identify similarities between different species or diseases. By leveraging a fine-tuned model on known categories, we generate pseudo-labels for unknown categories. Additionally, we enhance the baseline method's performance by using a larger pre-trained model, dino-v2. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on the large plant specimen dataset Herbarium19 and the disease dataset Plant Village. Notably, our method outperforms the baseline by 1% to 20% in terms of accuracy for novel category classification. We believe this study will contribute to the community.