Identification of Plant-Leaf Diseases Using CNN and Transfer-Learning Approach

The timely identification and early prevention of crop diseases are essential for improving production. In this paper, deep convolutional-neural-network (CNN) models are implemented to identify and diagnose diseases in plants from their leaves, since CNNs have achieved impressive results in the field of machine vision. Standard CNN models require a large number of parameters and higher computation cost. In this paper, we replaced standard convolution with depth=separable convolution, which reduces the parameter number and computation cost. The implemented models were trained with an open dataset consisting of 14 different plant species, and 38 different categorical disease classes and healthy plant leaves. To evaluate the performance of the models, different parameters such as batch size, dropout, and different numbers of epochs were incorporated. The implemented models achieved a disease-classification accuracy rates of 98.42%, 99.11%, 97.02%, and 99.56% using InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetB0, respectively, which were greater than that of traditional handcrafted-feature-based approaches. In comparison with other deep-learning models, the implemented model achieved better performance in terms of accuracy and it required less training time. Moreover, the MobileNetV2 architecture is compatible with mobile devices using the optimized parameter. The accuracy results in the identification of diseases showed that the deep CNN model is promising and can greatly impact the efficient identification of the diseases, and may have potential in the detection of diseases in real-time agricultural systems.