Deep Learning-based system for plant disease detection and classification

Abstract

Plant diseases and pests affect the growth of various plants, so it is very important to identify pests at an early stage. Although many machine learning (ML) models have already been used for the inspection and classification of plant pests, advances in deep learning (DL), a subset of machine learning, have led to many advances in this field of research. In this study, disease and pest inspection of abnormal crops and maturity classification were performed for normal crops using YOLOX detector and MobileNet classifier. Through this method, various plant pest features can be effectively extracted. For the experiment, image datasets of various resolutions related to strawberries, peppers, and tomatoes were prepared and used for plant pest classification. According to the experimental results, it was confirmed that the average test accuracy was 84% and the maturity classification accuracy was 83.91% in images with complex background conditions. This model was able to effectively detect 6 diseases of 3 plants and classify the maturity of each plant in natural conditions.