Robust Plant Disease Diagnosis with Few Target-Domain Samples

Various deep learning-based systems have been proposed for accurate and convenient plant disease diagnosis, achieving impressive performance. However, recent studies show that these systems often fail to maintain diagnostic accuracy on images captured under different conditions from the training environment -- an essential criterion for model robustness. Many deep learning methods have shown high accuracy in plant disease diagnosis. However, they often struggle to generalize to images taken in conditions that differ from the training setting. This drop in performance stems from the subtle variability of disease symptoms and domain gaps -- differences in image context and environment. The root cause is the limited diversity of training data relative to task complexity, making even advanced models vulnerable in unseen domains. To tackle this challenge, we propose a simple yet highly adaptable learning framework called Target-Aware Metric Learning with Prioritized Sampling (TMPS), grounded in metric learning. TMPS operates under the assumption of access to a limited number of labeled samples from the target (deployment) domain and leverages these samples effectively to improve diagnostic robustness. We assess TMPS on a large-scale automated plant disease diagnostic task using a dataset comprising 223,073 leaf images sourced from 23 agricultural fields, spanning 21 diseases and healthy instances across three crop species. By incorporating just 10 target domain samples per disease into training, TMPS surpasses models trained using the same combined source and target samples, and those fine-tuned with these target samples after pre-training on source data. It achieves average macro F1 score improvements of 7.3 and 3.6 points, respectively, and a remarkable 18.7 and 17.1 point improvement over the baseline and conventional metric learning.