Wheat Powdery Mildew Detection with YOLOv8 Object Detection Model

Wheat powdery mildew is a fungal disease that significantly impacts wheat yield and quality. Controlling this disease requires the use of resistant varieties, fungicides, crop rotation, and proper sanitation. Precision agriculture focuses on the strategic use of agricultural inputs to maximize benefits while minimizing environmental and human health effects. Object detection using computer vision enables selective spraying of pesticides, allowing for targeted application. Traditional detection methods rely on manually crafted features, while deep learning-based methods use deep neural networks to learn features autonomously from the data. You Look Only Once (YOLO) and other one-stage detectors are advantageous due to their speed and competition. This research aimed to design a model to detect powdery mildew in wheat using digital images. Multiple YOLOv8 models were trained with a custom dataset of images collected from trial areas at Tekirdag Namik Kemal University. The YOLOv8m model demonstrated the highest precision, recall, F1, and average precision values of 0.79, 0.74, 0.770, 0.76, and 0.35, respectively.