A multi-source domain feature adaptation network for potato disease recognition in field environment.

Accurate identification of potato diseases is crucial for reducing yield losses. To address the issue of low recognition accuracy caused by the mismatch between target domain and source domain due to insufficient samples, the effectiveness of Multi-Source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (MUDA) method in disease identification is explored. A Multi-Source Domain Feature Adaptation Network (MDFAN) is proposed, employing a two-stage alignment strategy. This method first aligns the distribution of each source-target domain pair within multiple specific feature spaces. In this process, multi-representation extraction and subdomain alignment techniques are utilized to further improve alignment performance. Secondly, classifier outputs are aligned by leveraging decision boundaries within specific domains. Taking into account variations in lighting during image acquisition, a dataset comprising field potato disease images with five distinct disease types is created, followed by comprehensive transfer experiments. In the corresponding transfer tasks, MDFAN achieves an average classification accuracy of 92.11% with two source domains and 93.02% with three source domains, outperforming all other methods. These results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of MUDA but also highlight the robustness of MDFAN to changes in lighting conditions.