AMaizeD: An End to End Pipeline for Automatic Maize Disease Detection

Abstract

This research paper presents AMaizeD: An End to End Pipeline for Automatic Maize Disease Detection, an automated framework for early detection of diseases in maize crops using multispectral imagery obtained from drones. We also develop a custom hand-collected dataset focusing specifically on maize crops was meticulously gathered by expert researchers and agronomists. The dataset encompasses a diverse range of maize varieties, cultivation practices, and environmental conditions, capturing various stages of maize growth and disease progression. By leveraging multispectral imagery, the framework benefits from improved spectral resolution and increased sensitivity to subtle changes in plant health. The proposed framework employs a combination of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as feature extractors and segmentation techniques to identify both the maize plants and their associated diseases. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in detecting a range of maize diseases, including common rust, grey leaf spot and leaf blight. The framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the custom hand-collected dataset and contributes to the field of automated disease detection in agriculture, offering a practical solution for early identification of diseases in maize crops using advanced machine learning techniques and deep learning architectures.