  Deep learning models have been successfully deployed for a diverse array of
image-based plant phenotyping applications including disease detection and
classification. However, successful deployment of supervised deep learning
models requires large amount of labeled data, which is a significant challenge
in plant science (and most biological) domains due to the inherent complexity.
Specifically, data annotation is costly, laborious, time consuming and needs
domain expertise for phenotyping tasks, especially for diseases. To overcome
this challenge, active learning algorithms have been proposed that reduce the
amount of labeling needed by deep learning models to achieve good predictive
performance. Active learning methods adaptively select samples to annotate
using an acquisition function to achieve maximum (classification) performance
under a fixed labeling budget. We report the performance of four different
active learning methods, (1) Deep Bayesian Active Learning (DBAL), (2) Entropy,
(3) Least Confidence, and (4) Coreset, with conventional random sampling-based
annotation for two different image-based classification datasets. The first
image dataset consists of soybean [Glycine max L. (Merr.)] leaves belonging to
eight different soybean stresses and a healthy class, and the second consists
of nine different weed species from the field. For a fixed labeling budget, we
observed that the classification performance of deep learning models with
active learning-based acquisition strategies is better than random
sampling-based acquisition for both datasets. The integration of active
learning strategies for data annotation can help mitigate labelling challenges
in the plant sciences applications particularly where deep domain knowledge is
required.
