Palm tree disease detection and classification using residual network and transfer learning of inception ResNet

Agriculture has become an essential field of study and is considered a challenge for many researchers in computer vision specialization. The early detection and classification of plant diseases are crucial for preventing growing diseases and hence yield reduction. Although many state-of-the-artwork proposed various classification techniques for plant diseases, still face many challenges such as noise reduction, extracting the relevant features, and excluding the redundant ones. Recently, deep learning models are noticeable as hot research and are widely used for plant leaf disease classification. Although the achievement with these models is notable, still the need for efficient, fast-trained, and few-parameters models without compromising on performance is inevitable. In this work, two approaches of deep learning have been proposed for Palm leaf disease classification: Residual Network (ResNet) and transfer learning of Inception ResNet. The models make it possible to train up to hundreds of layers and achieve superior performance. Considering the merit of their effective representation ability, the performance of image classification using ResNet has been boosted, such as diseases of plant leaves classification. In both approaches, problems such as variation of luminance and background, different scales of images, and inter-class similarity have been treated. Date Palm dataset having 2631 colored images with varied sizes was used to train and test the models. Using some well-known metrics, the proposed models outperformed many of the recent research in the field in original and augmented datasets and achieved an accuracy of 99.62% and 100% respectively.