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ARM-UNet: attention residual path modified UNet model to segment the fungal pathogen diseases in potato leaves

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Abstract

Agriculture faces considerable challenges with the growth of the demand for food. Potatoes are considered a staple food in many nations. The crop yield is affected by fungal pathogen diseases like Early Blight (EB) and Late Blight (LB). The crop yield can be enhanced by detecting the fungal pathogens at early stages using computer vision and artificial intelligence. The potato leaf disease segmentation is challenging in detecting the EB and LB. This paper presents a novel UNet-based architecture ARM-UNet (Attention-gate Residual path Modified UNet) in detecting potato fungal pathogen diseases. The proposed model replaces the skip connection by integrating the attention gates and residual paths to improve saliency and increase the depth of the network layers, which enhances the corresponding extracted pixel information transformed between the encoder and the decoder path. The ARM-UNet model segmented the diseased potato leaves. The proposed model performance is compared with the state-of-the-art UNet models and the existing methods for segmenting the diseased leaves using the performance metrics dice-score and mean-intersection over Union. The proposed model has produced an accuracy of 97.65%, where the DS is 93.15% and the mean-IoU is 84.18%. The experimental results show that the proposed model has efficiently segmented the diseased potato leaves.

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No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

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Contributions

Author contributions D N Kiran Pandiri proposed the main idea and designed the main aspects of the project; and finalized the paper writing, reviewed, and edited it.R Murugan designed and implemented all the software required to perform the experiments and reviewed, and edited it.Tripti Goel evaluated the data and reviewed and edited it.

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Correspondence to R. Murugan.

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Ethical approval was not sought for the present study because the datasets utilized in this study are publicly available.

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Pandiri, D.N.K., Murugan, R. & Goel, T. ARM-UNet: attention residual path modified UNet model to segment the fungal pathogen diseases in potato leaves. SIViP 19, 80 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-024-03566-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-024-03566-7

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