Optimized CNN-based ensemble deep learning approach for potato leaf disease detection with data augmentation

This paper explores the use of optimized convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to classify diseases affecting potato leaves using TensorFlow-2. The dataset, sourced from Kaggle's Plant Village repository, includes 152 images of healthy potato leaves and 1000 images each of early and late blight. The methodology covers data preparation, model architecture design, training, evaluation, and deployment. During data preparation, the data set was split into training sets (80%) and testing sets (20%), with images resized to 128x128 pixels. The Deep Learning (DL) models built using CNN with 4 different optimizers (ADAM, SGD, RMSPROP, and ADAMAX) and trained using a sparse categorical cross-entropy loss function, include multiple convolutional and pooling layers for feature extraction, and fully connected layers for classification. Early stopping was used to prevent overfitting. Model performance was assessed using accuracy, loss curves, confusion matrix, ROC curve, precision recall curve, classification report, and F1 score. In addition, we have used data augmentation to balance the dataset by increasing healthy potato leaves 6 times and the use of Ensemble Deep Learning (EDL). EDL10 which contains DL1 (CNN + ADAM), DL2 (CNN + SGD), DL3 (CNN + RMSPROP) and DL4 (CNN + ADAMX) performs best with a accuracy score of 97.0%. This highlights the importance of data balancing and the use of the ensemble classification approach for the detection of blight in Potato Leaves.