QUANTIFYING BIOTIC DAMAGE ON PLANT LEAVES, BY CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS

To quantify biotic damage in leaves of crop plants, a computer receives ( 701 A) a leaf-image taken from a particular crop plant. The leaf-image shows at least one of the leaves of the particular crop plant. Using a first convolutional neural network (CNN, 262 ), the computer processes the leaf-image to derive a segmented leaf-image ( 422 ) being a contiguous set of pixels that show a main leaf of the particular plant completely. The first CNN has been trained by a plurality of leaf-annotated leaf-images ( 601 A), wherein the leaf-images are annotated to identify main leaves ( 461 ). Using a second CNN ( 272 ), the computer processes the single-leaf-image by regression to obtain a damage degree ( 432 ).