Using Transfer Learning for Nutrient Deficiency Prediction and Classification in Tomato Plant

Abstract

Plants need nutrients to develop normally. The essential nutrients like carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen are obtained from sunlight, air, and water to prepare food and plant growth. For healthy growth, plants also need macronutrients such as Potassium, Calcium, Nitrogen, Sulphur, Magnesium, and Phosphorus in relatively great quantities. When a plant doesn’t find necessary nutrients for its growth inadequate amount, deficiency of plant nutrients occur. Plants exhibit various symptoms to indicate the deficiency. Automatic identification and differentiation of these deficiencies are very important in the greenhouse environment. Deep Neural Networks are extremely efficient in image categorization problems. In this work, we used the part of the pre-trained deep learning model i.e. Transfer Learning model to detect the nutrient stress in the plant. We compared three different architectures including Inception-V3, ResNet50, and VGG16 with two classifiers: RF and SVM to improve, classification accuracy. A total of 880 images of Calcium and Magnesium deficiencies in the Tomato plant from the greenhouse were collected to form a dataset. For training, 704(80%) images are used and for testing, 176(20%) images are used to examine the model performance. Experimental results demonstrated that the largest accuracy of 99.14% has resulted for the VGG16 model with SVM classifier and 98.71% for Inception-V3 with Random Forest Classifier. For a batch size of 8 and epochs equal to 10, the Inception -V3 architecture attained the highest validation accuracy of 99.99% and the least validation loss of 0.0000384 on an average.