An overview of activation functions used in Neuronal Networks: Application for plant disease diagnosis

Abstract

Deep learning techniques, particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have led to significant progress in image processing. Many applications in automatic identification of plant diseases have been developed. This work adopts a new approach that focuses on studying a relevant parameter that make a significant impact on the performance of CNNs, namely, the variants of activation function, particularly the most famous used functions and their influence on the model’s performance and accuracy. We will also present the different types of activation functions, which are also called transfer functions. Then, and through a case study application to the plant disease detection, we will have the opportunity to compare the results of these different functions with a graphical presentation using evaluation metrics, such as accuracy functions and loss functions as Binary Cross-Entropy. The training of the models was carried out using a free accessible database of 20,639 photographs, taken both in the laboratory and in real conditions from the crop fields. The data includes three plant species in fifteen distinct classes of combinations [plant, disease], including some healthy plants.