Tusubira, Jeremy FrancisAkera, BenjaminNsumba, SolomonNakatumba-Nabende, JoyceMwebaze, Ernest2022-12-292022-12-292020Tusubira, J. F., Akera, B., Nsumba, S., Nakatumba-Nabende, J., & Mwebaze, E. (2020). Scoring root necrosis in cassava using semantic segmentation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.03367.https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.03367https://nru.uncst.go.ug/handle/123456789/6748Cassava a major food crop in many parts of Africa, has ma- jorly been a ected by Cassava Brown Streak Disease (CBSD). The dis- ease a ects tuberous roots and presents symptoms that include a yel- low/brown, dry, corky necrosis within the starch-bearing tissues. Cassava breeders currently depend on visual inspection to score necrosis in roots based on a qualitative score which is quite subjective. In this paper we present an approach to automate root necrosis scoring using deep convo- lutional neural networks with semantic segmentation. Our experiments show that the UNet model performs this task with high accuracy achiev- ing a mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.90 on the test set. This method provides a means to use a quantitative measure for necrosis scor- ing on root cross-sections. This is done by segmentation and classifying the necrotized and non-necrotized pixels of cassava root cross-sections without any additional feature engineering.enCassavaCBSDNecrosisUNetSemantic segmentationArticle