Basil plant leaf disease detection using amalgam based deep learning models

Abstract

Medicinal plants have been found and utilized in traditional medical practices from ancient times. Many medicinal plants play a vital role in curating many life threatening diseases. Very few of the medicinal herbs are commercially cultivated. Many plant diseases are there which destroys these medicinal plants. Early detection of plant diseases can prevent the huge loss of these medicinal plants. Here, we presented a hybrid model that makes use of SVM along with the traditional convolutional neural network (CNN) for predicting Basil plants leaves diseases. We transformed the conventional CNN model by adding a classification layer Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) after feature extraction and this approach tends to perform better than traditional CNN as we make the dataset balanced by data augmentation and SVN and KNN tend to perform better in case of balanced samples. CNN is used for training, SVM/KNN is used for classification. The advantages of CNN and SVM are used in proposed the CNN and SVM and KNN model. It is assumed that such a combined model would incorporate the benefits of CNN and SVM. Here, we identified the four types of diseases that affect basil plant leaves as Leaf spot, Downy mildew, Fusarium wilt, Fungal, and Healthy. Since there isn’t a standard dataset for basil leaves, we created our own 803 picture data set and used various machine learning techniques to train and evaluate the model. However, over other existing algorithms, our hybrid model i.e., CNN+SVM has produced more accurate results. For five classes of basil plant leaves, the proposed model produced 95.02% accuracy of for leaf diseases.