A Hybrid Deep Learning and Optimized Machine Learning Approach for Rose Leaf Disease Classification

Analysis of the symptoms of rose leaves can identify up to 15 different diseases. This research aims to develop Convolutional Neural Network models for classifying the diseases on rose leaves using hybrid deep learning techniques with Support Vector Machine (SVM). The developed models were based on the VGG16 architecture and early or late fusion techniques were applied to concatenate the output from a fully connected layer. The results showed that the developed models based on early fusion performed better than the developed models on either late fusion or VGG16 alone. In addition, it was found that the models using the SVM classifier had better efficiency in classifying the diseases appearing on rose leaves than the models using the softmax function classifier. In particular, a hybrid deep learning model based on early fusion and SVM, which applied the categorical hinge loss function, yielded a validation accuracy of 88.33% and a validation loss of 0.0679, which were higher than the ones of the other models. Moreover, this model was evaluated by 10-fold cross-validation with 90.26% accuracy, 90.59% precision, 92.44% recall, and 91.50% F1-score for disease classification on rose leaves.