Plants are a major source of food for the world population. Plant diseases contribute to production loss, which can be tackled with continuous monitoring. Manual plant disease monitoring is both laborious and error-prone. Early detection of plant diseases using computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) can help to reduce the adverse effects of diseases and also helps to overcome the shortcomings of continuous human monitoring. In this study, we have extensively studied the performance of the different state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) classification network architectures i.e. ResNet18, MobileNet, DenseNet201, and InceptionV3 on 18,162 plain tomato leaf images to classify tomato diseases. The comparative performance of the models for the binary classification (healthy and unhealthy leaves), six-class classification (healthy and various groups of diseased leaves), and ten-class classification (healthy and various types of unhealthy leaves) are also reported. InceptionV3 showed superior performance for the binary classification using plain leaf images with an accuracy of 99.2%. DenseNet201 also outperform for six-class classification with an accuracy of 97.99%. Finally, DenseNet201 achieved an accuracy of 98.05% for ten-class classification. It can be concluded that deep architectures performed better at classifying the diseases for the three experiments. The performance of each of the experimental studies reported in this work outperforms the existing literature.
Part of the book: Technology in Agriculture