Classification Of Plants By Their Fruits And Leaves Using Convolutional Neural Networks

The population growth of the world is exponential, this makes it imperative that we have an increase in food production. In this light, farmers, industries and researchers are struggling with identifying and classifying food plants. Over the years, there have been challenges that come with identifying fruits manually. It is time-consuming, labour intensive and requires experts to identify fruits because of the similarity in fruit’s leaves (citrus family), shapes, sizes and colour. A computerized detection technique is needed for the classification of fruits. Existing solutions to fruits classifications are majorly based on fruit or leave used as input. A new model using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed for fruits classification. A dataset of 5 classes of fruits and fresh dry leaves plants (Mango, African almond, Guava, Avocado and Cashew) comprising of 1000 images each. The proposed model hyperparameters were: Conv2D layer, activation layer, dense layer, a learning and dropout rates of 0.001 and 0.5 respectively were used for the experiment. Various performances for accuracies of 91%, 97%, 78% and 97% were obtained for proposed model on local dataset, proposed model on benchmark dataset, benchmark model on local dataset and benchmark model on benchmark dataset. The proposed model is robust on both local and benchmark datasets and can be used for effective classification of plants