Low-cost convolutional neural network for tomato plant diseases classification

Agriculture is a crucial element to build a strong economy, not only because of its importance in providing food, but also as a source of raw materials for industry as well as source of energy. Different diseases affect plants, which leads to decrease in productivity. In recent years, developments in computing technology and machine-learning algorithms (such as deep neural networks) in the field of agriculture have played a great role to face this problem by building early detection tools. In this paper, we propose an automatic plant disease classification based on a low complexity convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, which leads to faster online classification. For the training process, we used more than one 57,000 tomato leaf images representing nine classes, taken under natural environment, and considered during training without background subtraction. The designed model achieves 97.04% classification accuracy and less than 0.2 error, which shows a high accuracy in distinguishing a disease from another.