Automated Classification of Banana Leaf Diseases using an Optimized Capsule Network Model

Plant disease detection and classification have undergone successful researches using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN); however, due to the intrinsic inability of max pooling layer in CNN, it fails to capture the pose, view and orientation of images. It also requires large training data and fails to learn the spatial relationship of the features in an object. Thus, Capsule Network (CapsNet) is a novel deep learning model proposed to overcome the shortcomings of CNN. We developed an optimized Capsule Network model for classification problem using banana leaf diseases as a case study. The two dataset classes include Bacterial Wilt and Black Sigatoka, with healthy leaves. The developed model adequately classified the banana bacterial wilt, black sigatoka and healthy leaves with a test accuracy of 95%. Its outperformed three variants of CNN architectures implemented (a trained CNN model from scratch, LeNet5 and ResNet50) with respect to rotation invariance.