Corn disease recognition based on the Convolutional Neural Network with a small sampling size

Crop disease management influences yield and quality, yet identifying corn diseases is still difficult. High labor costs, small number of sample, and uneven disease distributions contribute to the difficulty. We propose an improved Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model based on the transfer learning method for disease identification. The sample image set was enhanced by rotation and roll-over, then the migrated MobileNetV2 model was used to train the image data set for corn diseases. The Focal Loss function was used to improve the neural network loss function, and the Softmax classification method was used for corn disease image recognition. The training set accuracy, validation set accuracy, weight, run time, and the number of parameter in six models were experimentally compared. The verification set accuracy rates were 93.88% (AlexNet), 95.48% (GoogleNet), 91.69% (Vgg16), 97.67% (RestNet34), 96.21% (MobileNetV2), and 97.23% (migrated MobileNetV2). The migrated MobileNetV2 was 97.23% accurate and weighed 8.69 MB. Confounding the MobileNetV2 model improved the recognition accuracy by 1.02% and reduced the training speed by 6 350 seconds compared to the unconfounded model. The migrated MobileNetV2 model had the best corn disease recognition ability with a small sampling size; improved convergence speed, reduced model calculations, and greatly improved the recognition time.