Tomato Leaf Disease Identification and Growth Dataset Augmentation Based on UAE-GAN

To delve into the characterization of growth disorders in different crops, it is important to support the model with a large amount of image data that includes a variety of disease types and disease levels to capture the typical and subtle differences of various diseases on plant leaves. However, the actual process of gathering data is challenging, sample coverage is challenging to accomplish, data capture is impeded, and the quality of the data is subpar. This work aims to address the issue of data shortages by employing technical methods. In particular, we creatively investigated the UAE-GAN approach, which naturally combines CycleGAN, U-Net, Variational Autoencoder VAE, and Autoencoder to increase the data. Among these, U-Net can precisely extract the small details of disease locations in crop photos and provide a strong basis for further processing thanks to its special codec architectural benefits. The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) significantly enhances the diversity of data by mapping the image to the latent space and sampling based on a certain probability distribution, so producing new image samples that are distinct from the original image yet inherently connected. Learning the coding and decoding of the original image is the foundation of autoencoders. If a mild disruption is introduced into the coding process, it can achieve data augmentation in another dimension and create a sequence of new images with just little modifications to the original image. The aforementioned models are closely linked with CycleGAN to efficiently map and convert in a variety of picture domains and to fully leverage CycleGAN's remarkable unsupervised image conversion capabilities. The perception ability, feature capture ability, and information conversion ability of the fusion model for crop image data are significantly improved, and the key elements of each link in the data enhancement process are comprehensively considered to ensure that the generated new image data can not only retain the key features of the original data but also effectively extend the data boundaries to satisfy the requirements of model training for richness and diversity. On this basis, tomato leaf image data enhancement is studied, and the performance and stability of the combined model are verified.