Note: Plant Leaf Disease Network (PLeaD-Net): Identifying Plant Leaf Diseases through Leveraging Limited-Resource Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

Agriculture is the fundamental source of revenue and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in many countries where economically developing countries; especially the Global South are no exception. Various types of plant-based diseases are strongly intertwined with the everyday lives of those who are connected with agriculture. Among the diseases, most of them can be diagnosed by leaves. However, due to the variety of illnesses, identifying and classifying any plant leaf disease is difficult and time-consuming. Besides, late identifications of diseases cause losses for the farmers on a large scale, which in turn affects their financial state. Therefore, to overcome this problem, we present a lightweight approach (called PLeaD-Net) to accurately recognize and categorize plant leaf diseases in this paper. Here, leveraging a limited-resource deep convolutional network (Deep CNN) model, we extract information from sick sections of a leaf to accurately identify locations of disease. In comparison to existing deep learning methods and other prior research, our proposed approach achieves a much higher performance using fewer parameters as per our experimental results. In our study and experimentation, we develop and implement an architecture based on Deep CNN. We test our architecture on a publicly available dataset that contains different types of plant leaves images and backgrounds.