Comparative Analysis of YOLO Models for Plant Disease Instance Segmentation

Accurate detection and segmentation of plant diseases are essential for sustaining agricultural productivity and global food security. This report conducts a comparative analysis of three state-of-the-art YOLO models-YOLOv5, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8-emphasizing their efficiency in instance segmentation of plant diseases. The research employs a comprehensive dataset featuring various crops like rice, sugarcane, wheat, bell pepper, potato, and tomato, each suffering from different diseases. The methodology includes fine-tuning YOLO models with pretrained weights and optimizing them with the curated dataset.The assessment of performance is based on crucial metrics such as recall, mean average precision (MAP) and precision. YOLOv8 exhibits superior performance, with over $\mathbf{9 0 \%}$ average precision across all disease categories, significantly outperforming YOLOv5 and YOLOv7. This report offers detailed insights into the architectural features, training procedures, and evaluation metrics of each model. It also addresses the implications of the findings for practical agricultural applications, highlighting the role of advanced deep learning techniques in improving crop protection and management strategies. Despite the positive results, the report acknowledges limitations like dataset dependency and challenges in real-world deployment.