A Comparative Study on Plant Disease Detection and Classification Using Deep Learning Approaches

Agriculture is a big sector in nations like India, and it provides a living for many people. To improve crop productivity, it’s very necessary to identify and classify plant diseases and prevent them from spreading further so that they do not affect the whole plant. Artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision can help detect plant diseases that humans cannot always catch and overcome the shortcomings of continuous human monitoring. In this article, we aim to detect and classify diseases in tomato and apple leaves using deep learning approaches and compare the results between different models. Because tomatoes and apples are important components of the human diet, crop waste can result in losses for both farmers and ordinary people. These plant diseases have an immediate and negative impact on both the amount and quality of yield. Crop diseases must be identified and prevented as soon as possible to improve crop yield. Therefore, we need to monitor and analyze the growth stages of the plants so that the farmers can produce disease-free and with minimal losses to the crop. Furthermore, we used the sequential convolutional neural network (CNN) model followed by transfer learning models like VGG19, Resnet152V2, Inception V3, and MobileNet and compared the models based on accuracy. The performance of the models was evaluated using various factors such as dropout, batch size, and the number of epochs. For both, the datasets, the tomato, and apple MobileNet architecture performed better than the other existing models.