A Deep Learning-based Detector for Brown Spot Disease in Passion Fruit Plant Leaves

Pests and diseases pose a key challenge to passion fruit farmers across Uganda and East Africa in general. They lead to loss of investment as yields reduce and losses increases. As the majority of the farmers, including passion fruit farmers, in the country are smallholder farmers from low-income households, they do not have the sufficient information and means to combat these challenges. While, passion fruits have the potential to improve the well-being of these farmers as they have a short maturity period and high market value, without the required knowledge about the health of their crops, farmers cannot intervene promptly to turn the situation around. For this work, we have partnered with the Uganda National Crop Research Institute (NaCRRI) to develop a dataset of expertly labelled passion fruit plant leaves and fruits, both diseased and healthy.