Uncertainty-Aware Semi-Supervised Framework with Supervised Contrastive Learning for Sugarcane Leaf Disease Detection
Organizations: Indian Institute of Technology Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India · Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology, Telangana, India
Abstract
Sugarcane leaf diseases severely impact crop yield and quality, making accurate and timely detection critical for sustainable agriculture. Conventional deep learning models for plant disease detection depend on large annotated datasets, which are expensive to obtain and challenging to prepare due to challenges commonly observed across crop disease detection tasks, including (i) high intra-class variation caused by diverse symptom expressions across growth stages, (ii) subtle inter-class similarities between diseased and healthy tissues, and (iii) the risk of noisy labels degrading model reliability. To handle these challenges, we presented an Uncertainty-aware Mean-Teacher based Semi-Supervised Learning Disease Detection Network (U-SSDNet) that leverages unlabeled data while maintaining robustness. First, discrete wavelet transform preprocessing is applied to enhance lesion visibility and reduce intra- class variation. Subsequently, the KL divergence is employed to refine the pseudo-labels and reduce the impact of confirmation bias. At the same time, supervised contrastive learning is applied to make the features more distin- guishable and improve the separation among different classes. Experimental evaluations on sugarcane leaf disease datasets, considered a representative case study, demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves performance close to that of fully supervised models while requiring far fewer annotated samples and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and semi-supervised approaches.
Figures & tables
| Hyperparameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Image Size | 224 224 |
| Batch Size | 8 |
| Optimizer | AdamW |
| Learning Rate | 0.001 |
| Number of Epochs | 35 |
| Weight Decay | 0.0001 |
| Model | 50% Labeled | 20% Labeled | 10% Labeled | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acc | Pre | Rec | F1 | Acc | Pre | Rec | F1 | Acc | Pre | Rec | F1 | |
| ResNet-50 ( He et al., 2016 ) | 93.67 | 93.77 | 93.67 | 93.67 | 87.72 | 87.87 | 87.72 | 87.52 | 82.97 | 84.31 | 82.97 | 83.03 |
| VGG-16 ( Liu and Deng, 2015 ) | 70.50 | 70.45 | 70.50 | 70.14 | 53.07 | 54.27 | 53.07 | 52.88 | 46.93 | 48.82 | 46.93 | 47.03 |
| DenseNet-121 ( Huang et al., 2017 ) | 93.27 | 93.33 | 93.27 | 93.22 | 90.30 | 90.22 | 90.30 | 90.21 | 70.20 | 70.22 | 71.02 | 70.22 |
| ViT ( Dosovitskiy et al., 2020 ) | 93.42 | 94.22 | 93.42 | 93.42 | 70.22 | 71.82 | 70.71 | 70.81 | 50.02 | 49.05 | 50.04 | 50.55 |
| Swin Transformer ( Liu et al., 2021 ) | 85.66 | 85.45 | 85.66 | 85.66 | 75.52 | 77.45 | 75.52 | 75.66 | 45.45 | 45.67 | 45.45 | 45.49 |
| Model | 50% Labeled | 20% Labeled | 10% Labeled | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acc | Pre | Rec | F1 | Acc | Pre | Rec | F1 | Acc | Pre | Rec | F1 | |
| ResNet-50 ( He et al., 2016 ) | 91.48 | 91.73 | 91.48 | 91.51 | 92.07 | 92.03 | 92.07 | 91.96 | 85.48 | 85.18 | 85.48 | 84.93 |
| VGG-16 ( Liu and Deng, 2015 ) | 93.93 | 94.12 | 93.93 | 93.95 | 91.48 | 91.51 | 91.48 | 91.46 | 80.44 | 82.73 | 80.44 | 79.42 |
| DenseNet-121 ( Huang et al., 2017 ) | 91.93 | 92.20 | 91.93 | 91.89 | 88.67 | 89.23 | 88.67 | 88.67 | 86.81 | 88.24 | 86.81 | 86.71 |
| ViT ( Dosovitskiy et al., 2020 ) | 84.59 | 85.59 | 84.59 | 84.67 | 74.81 | 77.53 | 74.81 | 75.01 | 65.19 | 65.72 | 65.19 | 63.92 |
| Swin Transformer ( Liu et al., 2021 ) | 92.67 | 92.69 | 92.67 | 92.63 | 91.41 | 91.42 | 91.41 | 91.36 | 85.56 | 85.80 | 85.56 | 85.27 |
| Model | Acc | diff | Pre | diff | Rec | diff | F1 | diff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| U-SSDNet (w/o) | 92.21 | 2.59 | 92.38 | 2.44 | 92.98 | 1.90 | 92.51 | 1.69 |
| U-SSDNet (HOG) | 91.28 | 3.52 | 91.53 | 3.29 | 92.11 | 2.77 | 91.45 | 2.75 |
| U-SSDNet (LPB) | 92.52 | 2.28 | 92.78 | 2.04 | 93.19 | 1.69 | 92.81 | 1.39 |
| U-SSDNet (Wavelet) | 94.80 | 0.00 | 94.82 | 0.00 | 94.88 | 0.00 | 94.20 | 0.00 |
| Model | Acc | diff | Pre | diff | Rec | diff | F1 | diff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| U-SSDNet (w/o Aug) | 92.52 | 2.28 | 92.61 | 2.21 | 93.02 | 1.86 | 92.62 | 1.58 |
| U-SSDNet (Deep Aug) | 92.83 | 1.97 | 93.09 | 1.73 | 93.31 | 1.57 | 93.14 | 1.06 |
| U-SSDNet (Cut&Delete Aug) | 93.77 | 1.03 | 93.84 | 0.98 | 94.15 | 0.73 | 93.96 | 0.24 |
| U-SSDNet (Deep+Cut&Delete) | 94.80 | 0.00 | 94.82 | 0.00 | 94.88 | 0.00 | 94.20 | 0.00 |
| Model | Acc | diff | Pre | diff | Rec | diff | F1 | diff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| U-SSDNet (ResNet) | 71.34 | 23.46 | 59.56 | 35.26 | 73.04 | 21.84 | 64.88 | 29.32 |
| U-SSDNet (DenseNet) | 84.42 | 10.38 | 86.21 | 8.61 | 85.64 | 9.24 | 84.12 | 10.08 |
| U-SSDNet (EfficientNet) | 94.80 | 0.00 | 94.82 | 0.00 | 94.88 | 0.00 | 94.20 | 0.00 |
| Model | Acc | diff | Pre | diff | Rec | diff | F1 | diff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| U-SSDNet (w/o UA) | 91.28 | 3.52 | 91.54 | 3.28 | 92.05 | 2.83 | 91.55 | 2.65 |
| U-SSDNet (MC) | 92.83 | 1.97 | 93.45 | 1.37 | 93.06 | 1.82 | 93.17 | 1.03 |
| U-SSDNet (KL-Divergence) | 94.80 | 0.00 | 94.82 | 0.00 | 94.88 | 0.00 | 94.20 | 0.00 |