Plant Disease Detection in Precision Agriculture: Deep Learning Approaches

Plants affect economy, agriculture industry and climate of any country. Therefore it is very important to take care of plants. Like human being, plants are also infected by various disease that are resulted from virus, bacteria, and fungi. It is necessary to identify these diseases in time and cure them immediately to counteract the destruction of whole plant. In recent times, deep learning networks have attained tremendous improvement in classifying image and detecting object. Therefore, in our research, some pre-trained Convolution Neural Networks (AlexNet, VGG16, VGG19) have been utilised along with transfer learning for detecting plant diseases. First of all, pre-processing technique has been applied to improve image quality and increase the accuracy. After the training process, testing has been done for validating the results. To train these models, PlantVillage dataset has been used which contains both diseased and healthy leaves. 80% data has been utilised in training step and other 20% has been used in testing. In this research, precision, recall and f1-score are also computed besides the accuracy. Using AlexNet, VGG16, and VGG19 96.63%, 95.05%, and 95.22% testing accuracy have been achieved respectively. As we can see that among all models the modified AlexNet performed best and got 96.63% as accuracy, 92 % as precision, 91 % as recall, and 91 % as f1-score.