Zero-Shot Super-Resolution as a Test-Time Enhancer for Cross-Crop Plant Disease Recognition

Authors

  • Sani Saminu Saleh Department of Computer Engineering, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria
  • Yusuf Ibrahim Department of Computer Engineering, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria
  • Zaharuddeen Haruna Department of Computer Engineering, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria
  • Shehu Mohammed Yusuf Department of Computer Engineering, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26740/vubeta.v3i2.45798

Keywords:

Domain Shift, Zero-Shot Super-Resolutioneg, Plant Disease Recognition, Zero-Shot Learning, Triplet Loss

Abstract

Accurate plant disease diagnosis is central to precision agriculture, yet real-world performance degrades under blur, low resolution, and domain shift, weakening zero-shot recognition of unseen diseases. This paper investigates the integration of Coordinate Attention (CA) and Zero-Shot Super-Resolution (ZSSR) as test-time plug-ins to a standard Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) pipeline without using any target labels. Using Plant Village tomato to potato transfer, each target image is super-resolved via a compact, self-supervised SR CNN (50 inner steps with self-ensemble and back-projection) and then standardized to 224×224×3 before feature extraction with MobileNetV2 (global average pooling). A lightweight CA module enhances spatial channel attention, focusing on lesion regions. The visual embeddings (1280-D) are projected into a 300-dimensional, L2-normalized semantic space through a dense, BN, ReLU to dropout head, and class logits are computed as cosine similarity to Word2Vec prototypes. On the target (potato) test set, the proposed ZSL + CA + ZSSR model achieved 86.33% accuracy, outperforming both ZSL + ZSSR (79.04%) and the ZSTL benchmark (78.34%, VGG16 + Triplet + DAC-300). Confusion matrices show fewer PEB↔PLB and PH to diseased confusions, while training curves exhibit faster, more stable convergence when ZSSR and CA are jointly applied. These results indicate that per-image, test-time ZSSR with CA attention sharpens lesion cues and enhances cross-crop transfer, providing a lightweight, label-free pathway to improved field robustness and diagnostics.

Author Biographies

Sani Saminu Saleh, Department of Computer Engineering, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria

Sani Saleh Saminu is currently pursuing an MSc degree in Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Engineering, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria, Nigeria. He received his BSc(Ed) in Computer Science from the same institution. His research interests include plant disease recognition, computer vision, deep learning, zero-shot learning, and intelligent systems for agricultural and medical applications. He can be contacted via:

email: sanisaminusaleh1994@gmail.com

Yusuf Ibrahim, Department of Computer Engineering, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria

Yusuf Ibrahim is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Engineering at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, with over a decade of teaching and research experience. He holds a B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering (First Class Honours), an MSc and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering. He is also a Huawei Certified ICT Associate (AI), Huawei Certified Academy Instructor, and a COREN registered engineer. His research interests span Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Computing. Email: yibrahim@abu.edu.ng

Zaharuddeen Haruna, Department of Computer Engineering, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria

Zaharuddeen Haruna is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Engineering at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, with over seven years of teaching and research experience. He holds a B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering, an MSc and a Ph.D. in Control Engineering. He is also a COREN registered engineer. His research interests include Control Systems Design, System Modeling, Intelligent Robotics, Autonomous Systems, and Embedded Systems. Email: hzaharuddeen@abu.edu.ng

Shehu Mohammed Yusuf, Department of Computer Engineering, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria

Shehu Mohammed Yusuf is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Engineering at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, with over a decade of teaching and research experience. He holds a B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering, an MSc in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering. He is also a Huawei Certified ICT Associate (AI), Huawei Certified Academy Instructor, and a COREN registered engineer. His research interests span Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Bioinformatics. Email: smyusuf@abu.edu.ng

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Published

2026-05-05

How to Cite

[1]
S. S. S. Malam, Y. Ibrahim, Z. Haruna, and S. M. Yusuf, “Zero-Shot Super-Resolution as a Test-Time Enhancer for Cross-Crop Plant Disease Recognition”, Vokasi UNESA Bull. Eng. Technol. Appl. Sci., vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 251–261, May 2026.
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