VMF-SSD: A Novel V-Space Based Multi-Scale Feature Fusion SSD for Apple Leaf Disease Detection

Apple leaf diseases seriously affect the quality of apples and may lead to yield losses, detecting apple leaf diseases accurately can prevent diseases from spreading and promote the healthy growth of the industry. However, recent studies cannot achieve accurate detection of leaf diseases with high accuracy because the lesions are of different sizes. So, this paper proposed a novel apple leaf disease detection method called VMF-SSD (V-space-based Multi-scale Feature-fusion SSD), which is designed to extract more reliable multi-scale feature representations for varied sizes of diseased spots and improve the final detection performance. The multi-scale feature extraction is established with multi-scale feature representation to further improve the disease detection performance, especially for small spots. After that, a V-space-based location branch is presented to enhance the texture feature information and help further identify disease spot location. Finally, attention mechanisms are utilized to automatically learn the importance of feature channels at different scales for distinguishing diseased spots of different sizes. Experimental results showed that the VMF-SSD method achieves 83.19% mAP and obtains the detection speed of 27.53 FPS on the test set, which indicates that the proposed VMF-SSD method can achieve competitive performance on apple leaf diseases detection task and satisfy the requirements of agricultural production applications.