Identification of Pest Attack on Corn Crops Using Machine Learning Techniques †

Abstract

The agriculture sector plays a very important role in the increasing population, year by year, to fulfill requirements and contributes significantly to the economy of the country. One of the main challenges in agriculture is the prevention and early detection of pest attack on crops. Farmers spend a significant amount of time and money in detecting pests and diseases, often by looking at plant leaves and analyzing the presence of diseases and pests. Late detection of pest attacks and improper use of pesticide application can cause damage to plants and compromise food quality. This problem can be solved through artificial intelligence, machine learning, and accurate image classification systems. In recent years, machine learning has made improvements in image recognition and classification. Hence, in this research article, we used convolutional neural network (CNN)-based models, such as the Cov2D library and VGG-16, to identify pest attacks. Our experiments involved a personal dataset consisting of 7000 images of pest-attacked leaf samples of different positions on maize plants, categorized into two classes. The Google Colab environment was used for experimentation and implementation, specially designed for cloud computing and machine learning.