Recognition of plant diseases by leaf image classification using deep learning approach

Abstract

Plant health is important in maintaining the sustainability of the foods crop. The key to prevent the loss of yield of plant crops is the identification of plant diseases. The process of monitor plant health manually is challenging as it required expert knowledge which is expensive and time-consuming. Hence, the image processing techniques can be useful for the detection and classification of plant leaf disease. In this project, the leaf images of 5 plant types in the PlantVillage dataset are used for plant type and plant disease classification. The original images are resized to the required input sized and the proposed background removal methods (improved HSV and GrabCut segmentation) are performed to reduce the background noise. The segmented images are then given to proposed models (AlexNet and DenseNet121) for training and classification. For plant type classification, DenseNet121 got a better validation accuracy of 99% compared to AlexNet with 91.2%. After that, the leaf image is given to plant disease models according to their species. All the plant disease models training with DenseNet121 can achieve high validation accuracy of 99%, 99%, 100%, 100% and 97% for apple, grape, potato, strawberry and tomato. Lastly, a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) is developed.