Classification of Apple Tree Leaves Diseases using Deep Learning Methods

Agriculture is one of the essential needs of human life on planet Earth. It is the source of food and earnings for many individuals around the world. The economy of many countries is associated with the agriculture sector. Lots of diseases exist that attack various fruits and crops. Apple Tree Leaves also suffer different types of pathological conditions that affect their production. These pathological conditions include apple scab, cedar apple rust, or multiple diseases, etc. In this paper, an automatic detection framework based on deep learning is investigated for apple leaves disease classification. Different pre-trained models, VGG16, ResNetV2, InceptionV3, and MobileNetV2, are considered for transfer learning. A combination of parameters like learning rate, batch size, and optimizer is analyzed, and the best combination of ResNetV2 with Adam optimizer provided the best classification accuracy of 94%.