Coffee leaf rust, a foliar disease caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix, poses a major threat to coffee production, especially in Central America. Climate change further aggravates this issue, as it shortens the latency period between initial infection and the emergence of visible symptoms in diseases like leaf rust. Shortened latency periods can lead to more severe plant epidemics and faster spread of diseases. There is, hence, an urgent need for effective disease management strategies. To address these challenges, we explore the potential of deep learning models for enhancing early disease detection. However, deep learning models require extensive processing power and large amounts of data for model training, resources that are typically scarce. To overcome these barriers, we propose a preprocessing technique that involves convolving training images with a high-pass filter to enhance lesion-leaf contrast, significantly improving model efficacy in resource-limited environments. This method and our model demonstrated a strong performance, achieving over 90% across all evaluation metrics--including precision, recall, F1-score, and the Dice coefficient. Our experiments show that this approach outperforms other methods, including two different image preprocessing techniques and using unaltered, full-color images.

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) and Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) jointly conducted a challenge where over 800 data scientists globally competed to detect diseases in crops based on close shot pictures. The objective of this challenge is to build a machine learning algorithm to correctly classify if a plant is healthy, has stem rust, or has leaf rust. Wheat rust is a devastating plant disease affecting many crops, reducing yields and affecting the livelihoods of farmers and decreasing food security across Africa. The disease is difficult to monitor at a large scale, making it difficult to control and eradicate. An accurate image recognition model that can detect wheat rust from any image will enable a crowd-sourced approach to monitor crops. The imagery data came from a variety of sources.