CropGCNN: color space-based crop disease classification using group convolutional neural network

Abstract

Classifying images is one of the most important tasks in computer vision. Recently, the best performance for image classification tasks has been shown by networks that are both deep and well-connected. These days, most datasets are made up of a fixed number of color images. The input images are taken in red green blue (RGB) format and classified without any changes being made to the original. It is observed that color spaces (basically changing original RGB images) have a major impact on classification accuracy, and we delve into the significance of color spaces. Moreover, datasets with a highly variable number of classes, such as the PlantVillage dataset utilizing a model that incorporates numerous color spaces inside the same model, achieve great levels of accuracy, and different classes of images are better represented in different color spaces. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this type of model, in which the input is preprocessed into many color spaces simultaneously, requires significantly fewer parameters to achieve high accuracy for classification. The proposed model basically takes an RGB image as input, turns it into seven separate color spaces at once, and then feeds each of those color spaces into its own Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model. To lessen the load on the computer and the number of hyperparameters needed, we employ group convolutional layers in the proposed CNN model. We achieve substantial gains over the present state-of-the-art methods for the classification of crop disease.