Soybean Leaf Morphology Classification Based on FPN-SSD and Knowledge Distillation

Soybean leaf morphology is one of the most important morphological and biological characteristics of soybean.The germplasm gene differences of soybeans can lead to different phenotypic traits,among which soybean leaf morphology is an important parameter that directly reflects the difference in soybean germplasm.To realize the morphological classification of soybean leaves,a method was proposed based on deep learning to automatically detect soybean leaves and classify leaf morphology.The morphology of soybean leaves included lanceolate,oval,ellipse and round.First,an image collection platform was designed to collect images of soybean leaves.Then,the feature pyramid networks–single shot multibox detector （FPN-SSD） model was proposed to detect the top leaflets of soybean leaves on the collected images.Finally,a classification model based on knowledge distillation was proposed to classify different morphologies of soybean leaves.The obtained results indicated an overall classification accuracy of 0.956 over a private dataset of 3 200 soybean leaf images,and the accuracy of classification for each morphology was 1.00,0.97,0.93 and 0.94.The results showed that this method could effectively classify soybean leaf morphology and had great application potential in analyzing other phenotypic traits of soybean.