Tomato Disease Classification Using CNN

Plant disease detection using various machine learning techniques is a very popular research area. Many promising results have been obtained, but only a few specific applications can still make farmers’ lives easier. This research focuses on the important task of identifying tomato diseases at an early stage to prevent their spread and protect crop yields more broadly, emphasizing the idea that disease prevention will more important than treatment. Leveraging the capabilities of convolutional neural networks (CNN), we developed a model that diagnoses eight distinct tomato diseases using only their images. Diseases listed include bacterial spot, early blight, late blight, leaf mold, septoria leaf spot, two-spotted spider mite, target spot, and tomato yellow leaf curl virus. An integral part of our approach involves sophisticated image prepossessing and enhancement techniques, ensuring data quality and model robustness. Feature extraction plays a key role in transforming raw image data into recognizable patterns. The architecture of the CNN has been meticulously designed, consisting of multiple layers with a notable focus on the ReLU activation function and other relevant hyper-parameters. Our main dataset comes from PlantVillage, known for synthesizing rich and diverse plant images. After rigorous training and validation, the CNN model showed exceptional accuracy of 96.88% in tomato disease identification. However, challenges such as overfitting, image quality variability, and class imbalances were encountered but were resolved through strategic data augmentation, careful CNN overlay. In summary, our research presents a practical solution for farmers and agricultural entities.