Plant Diseases Identification through a Discount Momentum Optimizer in Deep Learning

Deep learning proves its promising results in various domains. The automatic identification of plant diseases with deep convolutional neural networks attracts a lot of attention at present. This article extends stochastic gradient descent momentum optimizer and presents a discount momentum (DM) deep learning optimizer for plant diseases identification. To examine the recognition and generalization capability of the DM optimizer, we discuss the hyper-parameter tuning and convolutional neural networks models across the plantvillage dataset. We further conduct comparison experiments on popular non-adaptive learning rate methods. The proposed approach achieves an average validation accuracy of no less than 97% for plant diseases prediction on several state-of-the-art deep learning models and holds a low sensitivity to hyper-parameter settings. Experimental results demonstrate that the DM method can bring a higher identification performance, while still maintaining a competitive performance over other non-adaptive learning rate methods in terms of both training speed and generalization.