A Hybrid Model for Leaf Diseases Classification Based on the Modified Deep Transfer Learning and Ensemble Approach for Agricultural AIoT-Based Monitoring

As possible diseases develop on plant leaves, classification is constantly hampered by obstacles such as overfitting and low accuracy. To distinguish healthy products from defective ones, the agricultural industry requires precise and error-free analysis. Deep convolutional neural networks are an efficient model of autonomous feature extraction that has been shown to be fairly effective for detection and classification tasks. However, deep convolutional neural networks often require a large amount of training data, cannot be translated, and need a number of parameters to be specified and tweaked. This paper proposes a highly effective structure that can be applied to classifying multiple leaf diseases of plants and fruits during the feature extraction step. It uses a deep transfer learning model that has been modified to serve this purpose. In summary, we use model engineering (ME) to extract features. Multiple support vector machine (SVM) models are employed to enhance feature discrimination and processing speed. The kernel parameters of the radial basis function (RBF) are determined based on the selected model in the training step. PlantVillage and UCI datasets were used to analyze six leaf image sets containing healthy and diseased leaves of apple, corn, cotton, grape, pepper, and rice. The classification process resulted in approximately 90,000 images. During the experimental implementation phase, the results show the potential of a powerful model in classification operations, which will be beneficial for a variety of future leaf disease diagnostic applications for the agricultural industry.