A versatile approach based on convolutional neural networks for early identification of diseases in tomato plants

Agriculture is one of the primary occupations in many countries. Tomatoes are grown by many farmers in countries where the water resource is available in abundance. Improper methods of cultivation and failure to identify the diseases when it is in the nascent stage results in the reduction of crop yield thus affecting the outcome of cultivation. This paper proposes a novel method of early identification of diseases in tomato plants by making use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) and image processing. Dataset from an open repository was considered for training and testing and the algorithm was capable of identifying nine different varieties of diseases that affect the tomato plant at its early stages. The images of tomato leaves were fed for identification through processing and classification. An optimum model was developed by analyzing various architectures of CNN including the VGG, ResNet, Inception, Xception, MobileNet and DenseNet. The performance of each of these architectures was compared and various metrics like the accuracy, loss, precision, recall and area under the curve (AUC) were analyzed.