Classification of mango disease using ensemble convolutional neural network

Abstract

Mango is a highly significant fruit crop that thrives in a variety of agro-ecologies around the world. Mangoes are rich in vitamins and minerals. However, its yield is currently severely constrained due to disease and pest infestations. Thus, in order to improve mango fruit quality and productivity, illnesses and insect pests must be detected early on. In this study, we conceived and constructed a mango leaf disease detection mechanism utilizing an ensemble convolutional neural network approach. Healthy and diseased mango leaf images were manually obtained from main producing locations in Amhara Region for Merawi fruit and vegetable research identification. To improve the datasets, several pre-processing procedures (such as image resizing, noise reduction, and image augmentation) were used. To improve classification performance and meet the study's purpose, various segmentation approaches such as k means and Mask R-CNN were applied. Furthermore, following pre-processing and segmentation, features of mango leaf images were retrieved using CNN to obtain important features. The classification model was then constructed using fully-connected layer classifiers on the retrieved features of mango leaf images. The ensemble proposed GoogLeNet and VGG16 based CNN model in the study encompasses various operations, including dataset collection, image preprocessing, noise removal, segmentation, data augmentation, feature extraction, and classification. Upon testing, the model demonstrated impressive performance with 99.87 % training classification accuracy, 99.72 % validation accuracy, and 99.21 % testing accuracy. This indicates the effectiveness of the ensemble approach in achieving high accuracy in image classification tasks.