Image augmentation improves few-shot classification performance in plant disease recognition
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With the world population projected to near 10 billion by 2050, minimizing crop damage and guaranteeing food security has never been more important. Machine learning has been proposed as a solution to quickly and efficiently identify diseases in crops. Convolutional Neural Networks typically require large datasets of annotated data which are not available on demand. Collecting this data is a long and arduous process which involves manually picking, imaging, and annotating each individual leaf. I tackle the problem of plant image data scarcity by exploring the efficacy of various data augmentation techniques when used in conjunction with transfer learning. I evaluate the impact of various data augmentation techniques both individually and combined on the performance of a ResNet. I propose an augmentation scheme utilizing a sequence of different augmentations which consistently improves accuracy through many trials. Using only 10 total seed images, I demonstrate that my augmentation framework can increase model accuracy by upwards of 25%.
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