Leveraging Convolutional Neural Network and Transfer Learning for Cotton Plant and Leaf Disease Recognition

Automatic Recognition of Diseased Cotton Plant and Leaves (ARDCPL) using Deep Learning (DL) carries a greater significance in agricultural research. The cotton plant and leaves are severely infected by a disease named Bacterial Blight-affected by bacterium, Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. Malvacearum and a new rolling leaf disease affected by an unorthodox leaf roll dwarf virus. Existing research in ARDCPL requires various complicated image preprocessing, feature extraction approaches and cannot ensure higher accuracy in their detection rates. This work suggests a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based DCPLD-CNN model that achieves a higher accuracy by leveraging the DL models ability to extract features from images automatically. Due to the enormous success of numerous pre-trained architectures regarding several image classification task, this study also explores eight CNN based pre-trained architectures: DenseNet121, NasNetLarge, VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, and Xception models by Fine-Tuning them using Transfer Learning (TL) to recognize diseased cotton plant and leaves. This study utilizes those pre-trained architectures by adding extra dense layers in the last layers of those models. Several Image Data Augmentation (IDA) methods were used to expand the training data to increase the model's generalization capability and reduce overfitting. The proposed DCPLD-CNN model achieves an accuracy of 98.77% in recognizing disease in cotton plant and leaves. The customized DenseNet121 model achieved the highest accuracy of 98.60% amongst all the pre-trained architectures. The proposed method's feasibility and practicality were exhibited by several simulated experimental results for this classification task.