Hybrid Deep Model for Automated Detection of Tomato Leaf Diseases

Tomatoes are preferred by farmers because of their high productivity. This fruit has a fibrous structure and contains plenty of vitamins. Tomato diseases are generally observed on stem, fruit, and leaves. Early diagnosis of the disease in plants is of vital importance for the plant. This is very important for farmers who expect economic gain from that plant. Because if the disease is not treated early, these tomatoes should be destroyed. For these reasons, systems to diagnose the disease early are very important. In this study, a tomato leaf diseases classification model developed with deep learning methods, which is one of the most popular artificial intelligence techniques, is proposed in order to eliminate the possibility of the human eye being mistaken. In this study, 6 different Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures were used. In the first stage of this study, which consists of two stages, the classification process was carried out with the Alexnet, Googlenet, Shufflenet, Efficientb0, Resnet50, and Inceptionv3 architectures that were previously trained. In the second stage, feature maps of tomato leaf images in the dataset were obtained using the six pre-trained deep learning architectures. In the hybrid model proposed in this study, the feature maps extracted using the best two of the six deep learning models are concatenated. Then, the Neighborhood Component Analysis (NCA) method was applied to the extracted features in order to speed up the system, unnecessary features were removed and optimized. The optimized feature map is classified by traditional intelligent classification models. As a result of experimental studies, the average accuracy rate of the proposed model is 99.50 percent.

Automated summary

This study proposes a tomato leaf disease classification model based on deep learning methods, which utilizes pre-trained convolutional neural network architectures to extract feature maps and employs optimized feature maps for intelligent classification. Experimental results show an average accuracy rate of 99.50% for the proposed model.