Detection and Classification of Leaf Disease Using Deep Learning for a Greenhouses’ Robot

Abstract

Plant diseases are a severe threat to the environment, economy, and health. Early disease identification remains a challenging task in Iraq due to the scarce of the necessary resources and infrastructure. This paper uses various deep learning algorithms to detect different diseases on plant leaves and detect healthy ones, using an RGB camera as a crucial part of our real-time autonomous greenhouses' robot along with using two datasets, plant-village and cotton dataset, to investigate the best convolutional neural network architecture. The first dataset contained 10,190 images from the plant-village open datasets; it includes four crops with ten distinct classes of diseased and healthy leaves. Moreover, the cotton dataset contained 2,204 images for training and 106 images for testing; it has four classes of diseased and healthy plants and leaves. Different network architectures were tested in this paper for the best suitable lightweight architecture for our mobile robot. Results show that the best performance is 99.908% which achieved by the VGG16 network. The highest accuracy of VGG16 obtained in our research makes it the best tool for our autonomous plant disease detection robot. Index Terms— Convolutional neural networks architectures, Computer vision, Deep learning, Leaf disease detection and classification, Precision agriculture.