Recognition of multiple plant leaf diseases based on improved convolutional neural network

Abstract: Plant leaf diseases are a serious problem in agricultural production. To solve this problem and prevent diseases deterioration, accurate identification of diseases types is of great significance. In this paper, we proposed a recognition model of plant leaf diseases based on convolutional neural network (CNN), which combines the batch normalization and global pooling methods. The parameters of the traditional CNN model are large and have difficulty to converge. The proposed model was modified in the traditional structure of the CNN, which could optimize the training time and achieve the higher accuracy, and also reduce the size of model. In order to speed up the training convergence, we used the batch normalization layers. We put the input of every convolutional layer in batch, calculated the mean and variance of the batch, and then normalized this batch. We reduced some feature maps of some layers and removed the last full connect layer, with the global pooling layer instead. The proposed model has 5 convolutional layers and 4 pooling layers. In the last pooling layer pool5, the same kernel size of convolutional layer Conv5 was used to take advantage of the information of Conv5's feature map comprehensively. For the image preprocessing, we had zoomed, flipped and rotated the original pictures of dataset randomly to get the augmented dataset, and used the 80% of pictures as the train dataset and the rest as the test dataset. These pictures were quantized to 256×256 dpi for CNN training, and the original dataset and augmented dataset were used to train models. To look for the best size of the first layer kernel, in the first convolutional layer, different kernel sizes i.e. 11×11, 9×9 and 7×7 dpi were used respectively. Furthermore, we chose the type of global pooling layer, like max pooling and average pooling. Then we designed 8 models with different Conv1 kernel sizes or global pooling types. To further improve the efficiency of this model, besides using the Gaussian initialization, we used the other common type of convolutional initialization such as Xavier initialization, and also used the PRelu activation function for each convolution layer. So the optimal model could be selected to recognize the 26 kinds of leaf diseases which involved 14 kinds of plants, and then we analyzed the model's convergence rate, memory usage and robustness. After the experiment, we compared the test accuracy between the traditional model and the proposed model based on original dataset and augmented dataset. The proposed model could accelerate the training convergence, and the test accuracy could achieve about 90% while the traditional model was only about 77% after 3 training epochs. Different kernel sizes of Conv1 had little impact on the accuracy but small kernel was proved to be more beneficial to the recognition of plant diseases, which could get more texture features than the big kernel size filter, and average pooling also made better results than max pooling. We got the best performance model which used the 9×9 dpi kernel size and global average pooling layer. To show the proposed model's performance, we tested the accuracy on each class, and the mean accuracy of augmented test dataset was 99.56%, and the weighted average score of recall and precision rate achieved 99.41%. The proposed model had the size of only 2.6 MB. In addition, compared with the traditional methods, the change of the spatial position of the pictures had little effect on the performance of the improved model, and the proposed model could identify different diseases of various plant leaves. The results show that the model has higher recognition accuracy and stronger robustness, and can be used for the identification of plant leaf diseases.