A deep learning generative model approach for image synthesis of plant leaves.

Objectives: A well-known drawback to the implementation of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for image-recognition is the intensive annotation effort for large enough training dataset, that can become prohibitive in several applications. In this study we focus on applications in the agricultural domain and we implement Deep Learning (DL) techniques for the automatic generation of meaningful synthetic images of plant leaves, which can be used as a virtually unlimited dataset to train or validate specialized CNN models or other image-recognition algorithms.

Methods: Following an approach based on DL generative models, we introduce a Leaf-to-Leaf Translation (L2L) algorithm, able to produce collections of novel synthetic images in two steps: first, a residual variational autoencoder architecture is used to generate novel synthetic leaf skeletons geometry, starting from binarized skeletons obtained from real leaf images.