Identification of plant diseases using convolutional neural networks

Plant pathologists desire an accurate and reliable soybean plant disease diagnosis system. In this study, we propose an efficient soybean diseases identification method based on a transfer learning approach by using pretrained AlexNet and GoogleNet convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The proposed AlexNet and GoogleNet CNNs were trained using 649 and 550 image samples of diseased and healthy soybean leaves, respectively, to identify three soybean diseases. We used the five-fold cross-validation strategy. The proposed AlexNet and GoogleNet CNN-based models achieved an accuracy of 98.75% and 96.25%, respectively. This accuracy was considerably higher than that for conventional pattern recognition techniques. The experimental results for the identification of soybean diseases indicated that the proposed model achieved highest efficiency. © 2020, Bharati Vidyapeeth's Institute of Computer Applications and Management.