CPD-CCNN: classification of pepper disease using a concatenation of convolutional neural network models

Agricultural products are vital to the sustainability of the economies of developing countries. Most developing countries' economies such as Ethiopia heavily rely on agriculture. On a global scale, the pepper crop is one of the most important agricultural products in terms of human food security. However, it is susceptible to a variety of diseases which include blight leaf disease, gray leaf spot, common rust, fruit rot disease, powdery mildew symptoms on pepper leaf, and other related diseases that are all common today. Currently, more than 34 different pepper diseases have been discovered, resulting in a 33% average yield loss in pepper cultivation. Conventionally, farmers detect the disease using visual observation but this has its own demerits as it is usually not accurate and usually time consuming. In the past, a number of researchers have presented various methods for classifying pepper plant disease, especially using image processing and deep learning techniques. However, earlier studies have shown that binary classification requires improvement as some classes were more challenging to identify than others. In this study, we propose a concatenated neural network of the extracted features of VGG16 and AlexNet networks to develop a pepper disease classification model using fully connected layers. The development of the proposed concatenated CNN model includes steps such as dataset collection, image preprocessing, noise removal, segmentation, feature extraction, and classification. Finally, the proposed concatenated CNN model was evaluated, providing a training classification accuracy of 100%, validation accuracy of 97.29%, and testing accuracy of 95.82%. In general, it can be concluded from the findings of the study that the proposed concatenated model is suitable for identifying pepper leaf and fruit diseases from digital images of pepper.