High-performance deep transfer learning model with batch normalization based on multiscale feature fusion for tomato plant disease identification and categorization

Abstract

Deep learning and machine learning are cutting-edge methods for analysing images that have considerable potential. Artificial Neural Networks (A-NNs), one of the most well-known methods of computer intelligence, are now used in machine learning (ML) and deep transfer learning (DL) to raise plant production and quality. Identification and primary prevention of plant diseases at the appropriate time are essential for boosting productivity. Due to the phenomenon of minimally intense data in the background and foreground areas of the image, the extensive colour similarity between regions of unhealthy and normal leaves, the presence of noise in the sampling data, and changes in the location, size, and shape of plant leaf, it is difficult to correctly identify and classify plant diseases. In an effort to address these issues, a reliable technique for classifying plant diseases was developed by using a deep AlexNet CNN architecture as the main network with batch normalisation. In the three-step process, the first annotation is made to obtain the RoI (region of interest). The AlexNet CNN is therefore suggested for deep primary feature extraction in a constructed efficient network. The research demonstrates that the existing strategy is superior to more recent ones in terms of accuracy and dependability in recognising diseases in plants. Based on a deep transfer AlexNet CNN model, this research work developed a model for diseases identification and classification in plant leaves. It is trained using additional datasets that include a variety of plant leaf classifications and background images. From Plant Village and Kaggle, we gathered data on healthy and diseased tomato plant leaves. We are obtaining a near-balanced dataset containing ten different leaf disease kinds, such as bacterial, fungal, viral, and nutrient insufficiency. Ten classes have been considered for this research by gathering a dataset with associated images of the typical and abnormal tomato plant leaves. Considered in this work were the various labels for healthy and diseased tomato leaves, such as early blight, Bacterial spot, late bright mold, healthy, etc. Since deep CNN models have shown notable machine vision results, they are used in this case to diagnose and categorise plant illnesses from their leaves. As a result, the proposed CNN models can thus now be evaluated from confusion matrix using data analysis criteria, primarily focusing on metrics for evaluation like training and validation accuracy, loss, Recall, Precision, F1 score, processing speed, and performance.