High-Throughput Robotic Phenotyping for Quantifying Tomato Disease
Severity Enabled by Synthetic Data and Domain-Adaptive Semantic
Segmentation
Abstract
Plant diseases cause an annual global crop loss of 20-40%, leading to
estimated economic losses of 30-50 billion dollars. Tomatoes are
susceptible to more than 200 diseases. Breeding disease-resistant
cultivars is more cost-effective and environmentally sustainable than
the frequent use of pesticides. Traditional breeding methods for disease
resistance, relying on direct visual observation to measure
disease-related traits, are time-consuming, inaccurate, expensive, and
require specific knowledge of tomato diseases. High-throughput disease
phenotyping is essential to reduce labor costs, improve measurement
accuracy, and expedite the release of new varieties, thereby more
effectively identifying disease-resistant crops. Precision agriculture
efforts have primarily focused on detecting diseases on individual
tomato leaves under controlled laboratory conditions, neglecting the
assessment of disease severity of the entire plant in the field. To
address this, we created a synthetic dataset using existing field and
individual leaf datasets, leveraging a game engine to minimize
additional data labeling. Consequently, we developed a customized
unsupervised domain-adaptive tomato disease segmentation algorithm that
monitors the entire tomato plant and determines disease severity based
on the proportion of affected leaf areas. The system-derived disease
percentages show a high correlation with manually labeled data,
evidenced by a correlation coefficient of 0.91. Our research
demonstrates the feasibility of using ground robots equipped with
deep-learning algorithms to monitor tomato disease severity under field
conditions, potentially accelerating the automation and standardization
of whole-plant disease severity monitoring in tomatoes. This
high-throughput disease phenotyping system can also be adapted to
analyze diseases in other crops with similar foliar diseases, such as
maize, soybeans, and cotton.