Performance analysis of efficient pre-trained networks based on transfer learning for tomato leaf diseases classification

Early diagnosis and accurate identification to tomato leaf diseases contribute on controlling the diffusion of infection and guarantee healthy to the plant which in role result in increasing the crop harvest. Nine common types of tomato leaf diseases have a great effect on the quality and quantity of tomato crop yield. The tradition approaches of features extraction and image classification cannot ensure a high accuracy rate for leaf diseases identification. This paper suggests an automatic detection approach for tomato leaf diseases based on the fine tuning and transfer learning to the pre-trained of deep Convolutional Neural Networks. Three pre-trained deep networks based on transfer learning: AlexNet, VGG-16 Net and SqueezeNet are suggested for their performances analysis in tomato leaf diseases classification. The proposed networks are carried out on two different dataset, one of them is a small dataset using only four different diseases while the other is a large dataset of leaves accompanied with symptoms of nine diseases and healthy leaves. The performance of the suggested networks is evaluated in terms of classification accuracy and the elapsed time during their training. The performance of the suggested networks using the small dataset are also compared with that of the-state-of-the-art technique in literature. The experimental results with the small dataset demonstrate that the accuracy of classification of the suggested networks outperform by 8.1% and 15% over the classification accuracy of the technique in literature. On other side when using the large dataset, the proposed pre-trained AlexNet achieves high classification accuracy by 97.4% and the consuming time during its training is lower than those of the other pre-trained networks. Generally, it can be concluded that AlexNet has outstanding performance for diagnosing the tomato leaf diseases in terms of accuracy and execution time compared to the other networks. On contrary, the performance of VGG-16 Net in metric of classification accuracy is the best yet the largest consuming time among other networks. © 2020, Science and Information Organization.