Deep Learning-Based Robust Analysis of Laser Bio-Speckle Data for Detection of Fungal-Infected Soybean Seeds

Seed-borne diseases play a crucial role in affecting the overall quality of seeds, efficient disease management, and crop productivity in agriculture. Detection of seed-borne diseases using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) can automate the process at large-scale industrial applications for providing healthy and high-quality seeds. ML-based methods are accurate for detecting and classifying fungal infection in seeds; however, their performance degrades in the presence of noise. In this work, we propose a laser bio-speckle based DL framework for detection and classification of disease in seeds under varying experimental parameters and noises. We develop a DL-based spatio-temporal analysis technique for bio-speckle data using DL networks, including neural networks (NN), convolutional neural networks (CNN) with long-short-term memory (LSTM), three-dimensional convolutional neural networks (3D CNN), and convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM). The robustness of the DL models to noise is a key aspect of this spatio-temporal analysis. In this study, we find that the ConvLSTM model has an accuracy of 97.72% on the test data and is robust to different types of noises with an accuracy of 97.72%, 94.31%, 98.86%, and 96.59%. Furthermore, the robust model (ConvLSTM) is evaluated for variations in experimental data parameters such as frame rate, frame size, and number of frames used. This model is also sensitive towards detecting bio-speckle activity of different order, and it shows average test accuracy of 99% for detecting four different classes.