LEMOXINET: Lite ensemble MobileNetV2 and Xception models to predict plant disease

Abstract

Plant diseases play a significant role in agricultural production, in which early detection of plant diseases is deemed an essential task. Current computational intelligence and computer vision methods have been promising to improve disease diagnosis. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models are capable of detecting plant diseases in an agricultural field and plantation leaf images. MobileNetV2 refers to an appropriate CNN model for mobile devices with subordinate parameters and model file sizes. However, the effectiveness of MobileNetV2 requires improvement to capture more critical features. Xception refers to the extension of InceptionV3 with fewer and excellent parameters in extracting features. This research suggests an ensemble of MobileNetV2 and Xception by concatenating the extracted features to improve plant disease detection performance. This study indicated that MobileNetV2, Xception, and ensemble model achieved 97.32%, 98.30%, and 99.10% accuracy when considering the entire Plant Village dataset. Particularly, MobileNetV2 and Xception models' accuracy improved by 1.8% and 0.8%, respectively. In addition, our model captures 99.52% of all metric scores in the user-defined dataset. Our model indicated better performance than the seven state-of-the-art CNN models, both individually and in ensemble design. It can be integrated with mobile devices, providing fewer parameters and model file size than an ensemble of MobileNetV2 with InceptionResnetV2, VGG19, and VGG16.