Papers › Improving plant disease classification by adaptive minimal ensembling

Improving plant disease classification by adaptive minimal ensembling

8 Sep 2022Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 2022 9archive 2025-07-28

Antonio Bruno, Davide Moroni, Riccardo Dainelli, Leandro Rocchi, Silvia Morelli, Emilio Ferrari, Piero Toscano, Massimo Martinelli

A novel method for improving plant disease classification, a challenging and time-consuming process, is proposed. First, using as baseline EfficientNet, a recent and advanced family of architectures having an excellent accuracy/complexity trade-off, we have introduced, devised, and applied refined techniques based on transfer learning, regularization, stratification, weighted metrics, and advanced optimizers in order to achieve improved performance. Then, we go further by introducing adaptive minimal ensembling, which is a unique input to the knowledge base of the proposed solution. This represents a leap forward since it allows improving the accuracy with limited complexity using only two EfficientNet-b0 weak models, performing ensembling on feature vectors by a trainable layer instead of classic aggregation on outputs. To the best of our knowledge, such an approach to ensembling has never been used before in literature. Our method was tested on PlantVillage, a public reference dataset used for benchmarking models' performances for crop disease diagnostic, considering both its original and augmented versions. We noticeably improved the state of the art by achieving 100% accuracy in both the original and augmented datasets. Results were obtained using PyTorch to train, test, and validate the models; reproducibility is granted by providing exhaustive details, including hyperparameters used in the experimentation. A Web interface is also made publicly available to test the proposed methods.

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Tasks

Benchmarking Classification Diagnostic Image Classification Transfer Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

Task	Dataset	Model	Metric	Value	Rank at snapshot	Leaderboard	Report
Image Classification	PlantVillage	adaptive minimal ensembling	Accuracy	100	#1 of 2	Archive leaderboard	report
Image Classification	PlantVillage	adaptive minimal ensembling	F1	100	#1 of 2	Archive leaderboard	report
Image Classification	PlantVillage	adaptive minimal ensembling	Testing Ratio	3%	#1 of 2	Archive leaderboard	report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

1x1 Convolution Average Pooling BASE Batch Normalization Convolution Dense Connections Depthwise Convolution Depthwise Separable Convolution Dropout Inverted Residual Block Pointwise Convolution RMSProp ReLU Sigmoid Activation Squeeze-and-Excitation Block Test

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