Cross-Domain Adaptation Techniques for Robust Plant Disease Detection: A DANN-CORAL Hybrid Approach

Plant disease detection with deep learning models has shown promising results, but these models often struggle with generalizing across diverse agricultural environments due to domain shifts in imaging conditions. This paper presents a novel hybrid approach focusing on cross-domain adaptation techniques to address the challenge of domain shift. Our proposed method combines the Domain-Adversarial Neural Network (DANN) with Correlation Alignment (CORAL) to mitigate domain shifts between datasets. The DANN framework enforces domain-invariant feature learning through adversarial training. Using the PlantVillage Dataset, with controlled environment images, and the New Plant Village Dataset, with varied conditions, the model is first trained on PlantVillage and then adapted to New Plant Village using the CORAL loss to support the second-order statistics. In case of domain shift experiments with various datasets, DANN-CORAL achieved accuracies 91.39%, precision 93.36%, recall 88.9% and F1-scores 91.05% indicating the robustness and generalizability of our model is better than the other baseline models. This approach enhances model robustness and adaptability, providing insights into combining adversarial and statistical alignment for cross-domain adaptation in agricultural imaging.