Robust diagnosis and meta visualizations of plant diseases through deep neural architecture with explainable AI

Abstract

Abstract Deep learning has emerged as a highly effective and precise method for classifying images. The presence of plant diseases poses a significant threat to food security. However, accurately identifying these diseases in plants is challenging due to limited infrastructure and techniques. Fortunately, the recent advancements in deep learning within the field of computer vision have opened up new possibilities for diagnosing plant pathology. Detecting plant diseases at an early stage is crucial, and this research paper proposes a deep convolutional neural network model that can rapidly and accurately identify plant diseases. Given the minimal variation in image texture and color, deep learning techniques are essential for robust recognition. In this study, we introduce a deep, explainable neural architecture specifically designed for recognizing plant diseases. Fine-tuned deep convolutional neural network is designed by freezing the layers and adjusting the weights of learnable layers. By extracting deep features from a down sampled feature map of a fine-tuned neural network, we are able to classify these features using a customized K-Nearest Neighbors Algorithm. To train and validate our model, we utilize the largest standard plant village dataset, which consists of 38 classes. To evaluate the performance of our proposed system, we estimate specificity, sensitivity, accuracy, and AUC. The results demonstrate that our system achieves an impressive maximum validation accuracy of 99.95% and an AUC of 1, making it the most ideal and highest-performing approach compared to current state-of-the-art deep learning methods for automatically identifying plant diseases.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物病害画像から病害状態を推定する深層学習手法の開発と性能評価が研究の中心であり、植物フェノタイピング手法に該当する。

Code and data availability

The paper's Data availability statement names the PlantVillage leaf-image dataset (the paper's phenotyping input) as publicly available on Kaggle; no author code or model deposit is provided.