VitiForge: a new procedural pipeline approach for grapevine disease identification under data scarcity

Early identification of grapevine diseases is critical for reducing yield losses and ensuring sustainable viticulture. CNNs trained on benchmark datasets such as PlantVillage often achieve near-perfect accuracy, yet this performance fails to translate to real-world field conditions where lighting, backgrounds, and lesion appearance vary widely. To address challenges of data scarcity and imbalance, this study introduces VitiForge, a novel procedural synthetic imagery pipeline for generating realistic synthetic grape leaf textures representing healthy, Black Rot, Esca, and Leaf Blight conditions. VitiForge is systematically evaluated against GAN-based augmentation through a data ablation study on PlantVillage and FieldVitis, a curated field dataset, using MobileNetV2, InceptionV3, and ResNet50V2 classifiers. Results show that VitiForge significantly improves performance in low-data regimes, enabling model training even without real samples, whereas GAN augmentation proves more effective once sufficient real data is available. On field imagery, VitiForge often matched or surpassed GAN-based methods, particularly when paired with MobileNetV2. These findings highlight the complementary roles of procedural and GAN-based synthetic data: VitiForge offers flexibility and scalability under cross-domain and data-scarce conditions, while GANs enhance realism and variability when ample data exists. Together, they support the development of robust and generalizable models for automated grape disease detection in precision agriculture.