Deep Learning-Based Maize Crop Disease Classification Model in Telangana Region of South India

Abstract

One of India's main crops, maize, accounts for 2–3% of global production. Disease detection in maize fields has become increasingly difficult due to a lack of knowledge about disease symptoms. Furthermore, manual disease detection methods take a lot of time and are not effective. Recent developments in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have exhibited remarkable performance in disease recognition and classification. A CNN is a deep learning technique that extracts the features from an image and performs the disease classification effectively. The optimization of hyperparameters is a tedious problem that impacts the performance of a model. The main purpose of the present research is to support future research to configure suitable hyperparameters to a model. In the present work, a deep CNN is proposed for the classification of seven different diseases of maize crop. Several hyperparameters, such as image size, batch size, number of epochs, optimizers, learning rate, kernel size, and number of hidden layers, were tested with various values in the experimental approach. The obtained results show that running the model for 200 epochs improved the classification accuracy with 87.44%. It also states that choosing input image sizes of 168 × 168 and 224 × 224 resulted in a good classification accuracy of 84.66% and 85.23%, respectively. The proposed deep CNN model has attained 85.83% classification accuracy with the Adam optimizer and a learning rate of 0.001. However, the results achieved by other optimizers, such as root-mean-square propagation (81.95%) and stochastic gradient descent (79.66%), are not better when compared with the Adam optimizer. Finally, the results have provided a better knowledge in selecting appropriate hyperparameters to the application of plant disease classification.