Convolutional neural networks for leaf image-based plant disease classification

Abstract

Plant pathologists desire soft computing technology for accurate and reliable diagnosis of plant diseases. In this study, we propose an efficient soybean disease identification method based on a transfer learning approach by using a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN’s) such as AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG16, ResNet101, and DensNet201. The proposed convolutional neural networks were trained using 1200 plant village image dataset of diseased and healthy soybean leaves, to identify three soybean diseases out of healthy leaves. Pre-trained CNN used to enable a fast and easy system implementation in practice. We used the five-fold crossvalidation strategy to analyze the performance of networks. In this study, we used a pre-trained convolutional neural network as feature extractors and classifiers. The experimental results based on the proposed approach using pre-trained AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG16, ResNet101, and DensNet201 networks achieve an accuracy of 95%, 96.4%, 96.4%, 92.1%, 93.6% respectively. The experimental results for the identification of soybean diseases indicated that the proposed networks model achieves the highest accuracy