Development of a Mobile Application for Plant Disease Detection using Parameter Optimization Method in Convolutional Neural Networks Algorithm

Abstract

Plant diseases are a serious problem in agriculture that affects both the quantity and quality of the harvest. To address this issue, authors developed a mobile software capable of detecting diseases in plants by analyzing their leaves using a smartphone camera. This research used the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) method for this purpose. In the initial experiments, authors compared the performance of four deep learning architectures: VGG-19, Xception, ResNet-50, and InceptionV3. Based on the results of the experiments, authors decided to use the CNN Xception as it yielded good performance. However, the CNN algorithm does not attain its maximum potential when using default parameters. Hence, authors goal is to enhance its performance by implementing parameter optimization using the grid search algorithm to determine the optimal combination of learning rate and epoch values. The experimental results demonstrated that the implementation of parameter optimization in CNN significantly improved accuracy in potato plants from 96.3% to 97.9% and in maize plants from 87.6% to 93.4%.