Potato disease identification using transfer learning approaches

Potato crop is one of the prominent consumed foods by human beings. When potato crops are infected by diseases it affects farmers negatively and to run in a loss. Therefore, early detection of the potato crop disease can play a vital role in minimizing the loss of the farmers. Nowadays, artificial intelligence technologies, more specifically deep learning techniques, provide solutions to many crops disease-related problems. However, training deep learning models requires a high computational power and huge amount of data as they are data hungry models. Also, designing a custom CNN models a difficult task and there are some variations to be considered. To avoid these difficulties, we adopted two pretrained models of DenseNet121 and VGG19 through transfer learning approaches. The achieved accuracy for DenseNet121 and VGG19 models are 82.6% and 98.56% respectively. DenseNet121 model obtained the average precision, sensitivity, and F1-score of 88.19%, 82.53, and 82.04%, respectively. Whereas VGG19 yields 98.39% of precision, 98.39% of sensitivity, and 97.26% of F1-score in ternary 3-class classification (early blight vs healthy vs late blight).