Leaf Pathology Detection in Potato and Pepper Bell Plant using Convolutional Neural Networks

Agriculture is the backbone of world’s economy. This sector faces predominant issues in recognizing crop infection, disease prediction, pest control, weed detection and yield prediction leading to the shortfall in both quality and production of food. To ensure food safety, high resilience and increased crop yields, the precise diagnosis and recognition of underlying plant disease along with classification of crops from weeds is vital. The recent advancements in automatic feature extraction and classification techniques using Artificial Intelligence have gained attraction in the field of agriculture and crop protection. This paper proposes a Novel Convolutional Neural Network model for crop disease classification. The model is trained and tested in publicly available Plant Village Dataset with 38 categories and 15 classes. For the experimental analysis, the model is trained with 5 classes which includes potato and pepper bell categories. Further, the performance of the proposed model is analyzed with machine leaning models such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighborhood (K-NN), Random Forest, Decision Tree and have attained the highest accuracy of 91.28%. In the testing phase, it is observed that this model is superior in terms of accuracy, specificity, precision, recall and F1-Score.