Plant Disease Detection Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network

In this research, we proposed a novel 14-layered deep convolutional neural network (14-DCNN) to detect plant leaf diseases using leaf images. A new dataset was created using various open datasets. Data augmentation techniques were used to balance the individual class sizes of the dataset. Three image augmentation techniques were used: basic image manipulation (BIM), deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN) and neural style transfer (NST). The dataset consists of 147,500 images of 58 different healthy and diseased plant leaf classes and one no-leaf class. The proposed DCNN model was trained in the multi-graphics processing units (MGPUs) environment for 1000 epochs. The random search with the coarse-to-fine searching technique was used to select the most suitable hyperparameter values to improve the training performance of the proposed DCNN model. On the 8850 test images, the proposed DCNN model achieved 99.9655% overall classification accuracy, 99.7999% weighted average precision, 99.7966% weighted average recall, and 99.7968% weighted average F1 score. Additionally, the overall performance of the proposed DCNN model was better than the existing transfer learning approaches.