Automatic Detection and Recognition of Citrus Fruits Diseases Using Deep Learning Model

Abstract

In a country's economy, agriculture plays a very vital role. Agriculture's yield and production are reduced by plant diseases, resulting in significant economic losses and instability in the food market. In plants, the citrus fruit crop is one of the most important agricultural products in the world, produced and grown in around 140 countries. It has a lot of nutrients, such as vitamin C. However, due to pests and diseases, citrus cultivation is widely affected and suffers significant losses in both yield and quality. The majority of plant diseases exhibit visible symptoms, and the accepted method used today is for a skilled plant pathologist to detect the diseases by examining affected plant leaves under a microscope, which is a costly and time-consuming method. During the last decade, computer vision and machine learning have been widely adopted to detect and classify plant diseases, providing opportunities for early disease detection and bringing improvements to agricultural production. The early detection and accurate diagnosis of plant diseases are essential for reducing their spread and damage to crops. In this work, we presented an automatic system for early detection and recognition of citrus plant diseases based on a deep learning (DL) model to improve accuracy and reduce computational complexity. The most recent transfer learning-based models were applied to our dataset in order to increase classification accuracy. In this work, we successfully proposed a CNN-based pre-trained model (EfficientNetB3, ResNet50, MobiNetV2, (InceptionV3) for the identification and classification of citrus plant diseases using transfer learning. In order to assess the performance of the model, we found that the transfer of an EfficientNetb3 model led to the highest training, validating, and testing accuracies, which were 99.43%, 99.48%, and 99.58%, respectively. The proposed CNN model exceeds other cutting-edge CNN network architectures developed in earlier literature in the identification and categorization of citrus plant diseases.