Classification of Plant Leaf Diseases Based on Improved Convolutional Neural Network

Plant leaf diseases are closely related to people’s daily life. Due to the wide variety of diseases, it is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive to identify and classify diseases by artificial eyes, but also easy to be misidentified with having a high error rate. Therefore, we proposed a deep learning-based method to identify and classify plant leaf diseases. The proposed method can take the advantages of the neural network to extract the characteristics of diseased parts, and thus to classify target disease areas. To address the issues of long training convergence time and too-large model parameters, the traditional convolutional neural network was improved by combining a structure of inception module, a squeeze-and-excitation (SE) module and a global pooling layer to identify diseases. Through the Inception structure, the feature data of the convolutional layer were fused in multi-scales to improve the accuracy on the leaf disease dataset. Finally, the global average pooling layer was used instead of the fully connected layer to reduce the number of model parameters. Compared with some traditional convolutional neural networks, our model yielded better performance and achieved an accuracy of 91.7% on the test data set. At the same time, the number of model parameters and training time have also been greatly reduced. The experimental classification on plant leaf diseases indicated that our method is feasible and effective.