From Pixels to Diagnosis: Implementing and Evaluating a CNN Model for Tomato Leaf Disease Detection

The frequent emergence of multiple diseases in tomato plants poses a significant challenge to agriculture, requiring innovative solutions to deal with this problem. The paper explores the application of machine learning (ML) technologies to develop a model capable of identifying and classifying diseases in tomato leaves. Our work involved the implementation of a custom convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on a diverse dataset of tomato leaf images. The performance of the proposed CNN model was evaluated and compared against the performance of existing pre-trained CNN models, i.e., the VGG16 and VGG19 models, which are extensively used for image classification tasks. The proposed CNN model was further tested with images of tomato leaves captured from a real-world garden setting in Greece. The captured images were carefully preprocessed and an in-depth study was conducted on how either each image preprocessing step or a different—not supported by the dataset used—strain of tomato affects the accuracy and confidence in detecting tomato leaf diseases.