Classification of Medicinal Plant Leaves for Types and Diseases with Hybrid Deep Learning Methods

Abstract

Leaf images are often used to detect plant diseases because most disease symptoms appear on the leaves. Analyzes performed by experts in the laboratory environment are expensive and time consuming. Therefore, there is a need for automated plant disease detection systems that are both economical and can help diagnose early symptoms more accurately. In this study, a deep learning-based methodology is presented for the classification of leaf diseases of plants, which are very similar in color, texture, vein and shape and cannot be noticed by non-experts, which are important for traditional medicine and pharmaceutical industry. In the model development process, 7 pre-learning deep learning algorithms and an image data set created from plant leaves in ten categories were preferred. The proposed model classifies the plant type and diseased condition in the dataset. In the first step of training the model, different learning rates were tested with optimum hyperparameters. In the second part, a test accuracy rate of 98.69% was achieved with the DenseNet121 model, with increased data. At the last stage, after the edge detection processes, the test accuracy value of 67.92% was reached with the DenseNet 121 model.