Comparative Study of Deep Learning Techniques for Detecting Tomato Plant Leaf Diseases Using Transfer Learning

Plant leaf diseases pose significant threats to crop yield and agricultural sustainability, making early and accurate detection crucial for effective disease management. In recent years, deep neural network (DNN) techniques have shown remarkable potential in the field of image classification, including plant disease detection. This study aims to investigate the performance of two popular deep learning architectures, namely, Xception, and InceptionResNetV2, for the detection of tomato plant leaf disease. The proposed methodology involves acquiring a diverse dataset comprising high-resolution images of healthy and diseased leaves from the target crops. Preprocessing techniques such as image augmentation and normalization are applied to enhance the generalization ability of the models and mitigate overfitting. Transfer learning is employed to initialize the deep learning architectures with weights pre-trained on large-scale image datasets to accelerate convergence and improve the models' performance in limited data scenarios. To evaluate performance of proposed networks various metrics such as validation and test accuracies, precision and recall, F1 score, and the area under the curve (AUC) are considered. From the investigations, the classification accuracy of the finest architectures is as follows: 99.8 percent for Xception and 99.4 percent for InceptionResNetV2 on Tomato Leaves. The results suggest that the models developed during the investigation phase to identify the leaf disease were superior to any existing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs).