Plant Disease Detection using Advanced Convolutional Neural Networks with Region of Interest Awareness

The advent of deep learning has paved way for more efficient computer vision applications. In agricultural crop monitoring with technology driven approaches, it is indispensable to have plant disease identification. Recent research reveals that Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is most suitable deep learning method to process leaf images for detecting diseases. As symptoms of leaf disease appear in specific area, considering entire leaf for processing incurs more computational cost and time besides deteriorating performance due to inadequate quality of training. To overcome this problem, we proposed a framework that considers extraction of ROI using deep CNN prior to prediction of pre-trained deep learning models such as VGG13, Res Net34, Dense Net19, Alex Net, Sqeezenet1_1 and Inception_v3. An algorithm named ROI Feature Map Creation (ROI-FMC) is defined to extract ROI for given input image. This will be given as input to another algorithm proposed namely ROI based Deep CNN with Transfer Learning for Leaf Disease Prediction (ROIDCNN-LDP). The latter is used to predict leaf diseases. Plant Village dataset is used for empirical study. The experimental results revealed that with ROI awareness, all models could perform well. However, Inception_v3 is the deep CNN model that outperforms other models