Identification of the types of disease for tomato plants using a modified gray wolf optimization optimized MobileNetV2 convolutional neural network architecture driven computer vision framework

Tomato is a widely consumed fruit across the world due to its high nutritional values. Leaf diseases in tomato are very common which incurs huge damages but early detection of leaf diseases can help in avoiding that. The existing practices for detecting different diseases by the human experts are costly, time consuming and subjective in nature. Computer vision plays important role toward early detection of tomato leaf detection. However, implementation of computationally less expensive model and improvement of detection performance is still open. This article reports a computer vision based system to classify seven different categories of diseases, namely, bacterial spot, early blight, late blight, leaf mold, septoria leaf spot, spider mites, and target spots using optimized MobileNetV2 architecture. A modified gray wolf optimization approach has been adopted for optimization of MobileNetV2 hyperparameters for improved performance. The model has been validated using standard internal and external validation methods and found to provide the classification accuracy in the tune of 98%. The results reflect the promising potential of the presented framework for early detection of tomato leaf diseases which can help to avoid substantial agricultural loss.