Multimedia Tools and Applications, vol.82, no.8, pp.12577-12594, 2023 (SCI-Expanded)
Leaf spot disease, which causes 10 − 50% loss in sugar beet yield, causes great damage on the leaves. This disease physiologically appears as individual circular spots on the sugar beet leaves and over time spreads to the entire leaf, resulting in complete death of the leaf. Therefore, in our study, Faster R-CNN, SSD, VGG16, Yolov4 deep learning models were used directly, and Yolov4 deep learning model with image processing was used in a hybrid way for automatic determination of leaf spot disease on sugar beet and classification of severity. The proposed hybrid method for the diagnosis of diseases and identifying the severity were trained and tested using 1040 images, and the classification accuracy rate of the most successful method was found to be 96.47%. The proposed hybrid approach showed that the combined use of image processing and deep learning models yield more successful results than the analysis made using only deep learning models. In this way, both the time spent for the diagnosis of leaf spot disease on sugar beet will be reduced and human error will be eliminated, and the relevant pesticides will be sprayed to the plant at the right time.