Disease classification in Solanum melongena using deep learning

Abstract

Aim of study: The application of pre-trained deep learning models, AlexNet and VGG16, for classification of five diseases (Epilachna beetle infestation, little leaf, Cercospora leaf spot, two-spotted spider mite and Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV)) and a healthy plant in Solanum melongena (brinjal in Asia, eggplant in USA and aubergine in UK) with images acquired from smartphones.Area of study: Images were acquired from fields located at Alangudi (Pudukkottai district), Tirumalaisamudram and Pillayarpatti (Thanjavur district) – Tamil Nadu, India.Material and methods: Most of earlier studies have been carried out with images of isolated leaf samples, whereas in this work the whole or part of the plant images were utilized for the dataset creation. Augmentation techniques were applied to the manually segmented images for increasing the dataset size. The classification capability of deep learning models was analysed before and after augmentation. A fully connected layer was added to the architecture and evaluated for its performance.Main results: The modified architecture of VGG16 trained with the augmented dataset resulted in an average validation accuracy of 96.7%. Despite the best accuracy, all the models were tested with sample images from the field and the modified VGG16 resulted in an accuracy of 93.33%.Research highlights: The findings provide a guidance for possible factors to be considered in future research relevant to the dataset creation and methodology for efficient prediction using deep learning models.