Classification of Corn Diseases from Leaf Images Using Deep Transfer Learning.

Abstract

Corn is a mass-produced agricultural product that plays a major role in the food chain and many agricultural products in addition to biofuels. Furthermore, households in poor countries may depend on small-scale corn cultivation for their basic needs. However, corn crops are vulnerable to diseases, which greatly affects farming yields. Moreover, extreme weather conditions and unseasonable temperatures can accelerate the spread of diseases. The pervasiveness and ubiquity of technology have allowed for the deployment of technological innovations in many areas. Particularly, applications powered by artificial intelligence algorithms have established themselves in many disciplines relating to image, signal, and sound recognition. In this work, we target the application of deep transfer learning in the classification of three corn diseases (i.e., Cercospora leaf spot, common rust, and northern leaf blight) in addition to the healthy plants. Using corn leaf image as input and convolutional neural networks models, no preprocessing or explicit feature extraction was required. Transfer learning using well-established and well-designed deep learning models was performed and extensively evaluated using multiple scenarios for splitting the data. In addition, the experiments were repeated 10 times to account for variability in picking random choices. The four classes were discerned with a mean accuracy of 98.6%. This and the other performance metrics exhibit values that make it feasible to build and deploy applications that can aid farmers and plant pathologists to promptly and accurately perform disease identification and apply the correct remedies.

Plant phenotyping relevance

トウモロコシ葉画像から病害状態を推定する深層学習手法の適用・反復評価が中心であり、植物病害フェノタイピングに該当する。

Code and data availability

The paper uses a third-party corn leaf image dataset (Pandian & Geetharamani, Mendeley Data, ref [26]) that is cited prior work rather than an authors' deposit, and the Data Availability Statement says 'Not applicable.' No authors' code, models, or paper-specific public assets are provided; the only URL (pjreddie.com/d

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