Crop Leaf Disease Identification Using Deep Transfer Learning

Traditional manual identification of crop leaf diseases is challenging. Owing to the limitations in manpower and resources, it is challenging to explore crop diseases on a large scale. The emergence of artificial intelligence technologies, particularly the extensive application of deep learning technologies, is expected to overcome these challenges and greatly improve the accuracy and efficiency of crop disease identification. Crop leaf disease identification models have been designed and trained using large-scale training data, enabling them to predict different categories of diseases from unlabeled crop leaves. However, these models, which possess strong feature representation capabilities, require substantial training data, and there is often a shortage of such datasets in practical farming scenarios. To address this issue and improve the feature learning abilities of models, this study proposes a deep transfer learning adaptation strategy. The novel proposed method aims to transfer the weights and parameters from pre -trained models in similar large-scale training datasets, such as ImageNet. ImageNet pre -trained weights are adopted and fine-tuned with the features of crop leaf diseases to improve prediction ability. In this study, we collected 16,060 crop leaf disease images, spanning 12 categories, for training. The experimental results demonstrate that an impressive accuracy of 98% is achieved using the proposed method on the transferred ResNet-50 model, thereby confirming the effectiveness of our transfer learning approach.