Factors influencing the use of deep learning for plant disease recognition

Deep learning is quickly becoming one of the most important tools for image classification. This technology is now beginning to be applied to the tasks of plant disease classification and recognition. The positive results that are being obtained using this approach hide some issues that are seldom taken into account in the respective experiments. This article presents an investigation into the main factors that affect the design and effectiveness of deep neural nets applied to plant pathology. An in-depth analysis of the subject, in which advantages and shortcomings are highlighted, should lead to more realistic conclusions on the subject. The arguments used throughout the text are built upon both studies found in the literature and experiments carried out using an image database carefully built to reflect and reproduce many of the conditions expected to be found in practice. This database, which contains almost 50,000 images, is being made freely available for academic purposes. (C) 2018 IAgrE. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.