Classification of Plant Disease using a State-of-the Art Deep learning Algorithm on a Tesla GPU

Abstract

This paper proposes a study conducted on various techniques that can be employed for the early detection of plant diseases. With exponential growth in the global population, there is a dire need for the detection and prevention of various types of plant diseases such as Mosaic virus in Solanum Lycopersicon (tomato), bacterial spot in Fragaria Ananassa (strawberry), late and early blight in Solanum Tuberosum (potato), huanglongbing in Citrus sinensis (orange), and Isariopsis leaf spot in Vitis vinifera (grapes). These diseases generally lead to lower yields and hence less profit. In the last two decades, there has been rapid development in the fields of image processing and deep learning. Various models of deep learning can be used for plant disease detection. The main objective is that as soon as plant leaf disease appears, there should be one device to monitor the symptoms and detect them over a large field with as much accuracy as possible. This study compares the deep learning models Resnet, MobileNet, and inceptionV3 that are implemented on a large dataset taken from the Kaggle repository. We implemented the models using Google Colaboratory tools, which provide us with Python’s Jupyter notebook that runs on the Google cloud server. The GPU “Tesla T4” and CPU “Intel Xenon” were used during training, validation, and testing respectively. The training and validation accuracy of the InceptionV3 model was 98.78% and 93.94%, respectively. MobileNet classified various plant diseases with training and validation accuracies of 99.57% and 97.31. Similarly, for ResNet, the training accuracy was found to be around 99.62% and the validation accuracy was 97.16%. We hope that this work will provide a helpful resource for other researchers working in the field of agriculture to detect various types of crop diseases. Future work and some challenges still faced are also discussed in this study.