An ensemble deep learning model for automatic classification of cotton leaves diseases

Cotton plant (Gossypium herbaceum), is one of the significant fiber crop grown worldwide. However, the crop is quite prone to leaves diseases, for which deep learning (DL) techniques can be utilized for early disease prediction and prevent stakeholders from losing the harvest. The objective of this paper is to develop a novel ensemble based deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) model developed on two base pretrained models named: VGG16 and InceptionV3 for early detection of cotton leaves diseases. The proposed ensemble model trained on cotton leaves dataset reports higher training and testing prediction accuracies as compared to the base pretrained models. Given that, deep learning architectures have hyper-parameters, this paper presents exhaustive experimental evaluations on ensemble model to tune hyper-parameters named learning rate, optimizer and no of epochs. The suggested hyper-parameter settings can be directly utilized while employing the ensemble model for cotton plant leaves disease detection and prediction. With suggested hyper-parameters settings of learning rate 0.0001, 20 epochs and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimizer, ensemble model reported training and testing accuracies of 98% and 95% respectively, which was higher than the training and testing accuracies of VGG16 and InceptionV3 pretrained DCNN models.