Leaf Diseases Identification and Classification of Self-Collected Dataset on Groundnut Crop using Progressive Convolutional Neural Network (PGCNN)

Abstract

A healthy crop is required to provide high-quality food for daily consumption. Crop leaf diseases have more influence on agronomic production and our country. Earlier, many scholars relied on traditional techniques to detect and classify leaf diseases. Furthermore, classification at an early stage is impossible when there are not enough experts and inadequate research facilities. As technology progresses into our day to day life, an Artificial Intelligence subset called Deep Learning (DL) models plays a vital role in the automatic identification of groundnut leaf diseases. The essential for controlling diseases that are spread to the healthy development of groundnut farming. Deep Learning can resolve the issues of finding leaf diseases early and effectively. Most of the researchers concentrate on detecting leaf diseases by doing research in Machine Learning (ML) approaches, which leads to low accuracy and high loss. To achieve better accuracy and decreases the loss in the DL model by identifying the leaf diseases of groundnut crops at an early stage, we propose the Progressive Groundnut Convolutional Neural Network (PGCNN) model. This paper mainly focuses on identifying and classifying groundnut leaf diseases with a self-collected dataset which is collected from the various climatic conditions around the village located nearby Pudukkottai district, Tamil Nadu, India. The common diseases that occurred in those areas were gathered namely early spot, late spot, rust, and rosette. Model Performance metrics analysis was done to evaluate the model performance and also compared with the various DL architectures like AlexNet, VGG11, VGG13, VGG16, and VGG19. The proposed models have achieved a training accuracy of 99.39% and a validation accuracy of 97.58%, continuing with an overall accuracy of 97.58%.