Classification of Pear Leaf Diseases Based on Ensemble Convolutional Neural Networks

Over the last few years, the impact of climate change has increased rapidly. It is influencing all steps of plant production and forcing farmers to change and adapt their crop management practices using new technologies based on data analytics. This study aims to classify plant diseases based on images collected directly in the field using deep learning. To this end, an ensemble learning paradigm is investigated to build a robust network in order to predict four different pear leaf diseases. Several convolutional neural network architectures, named EfficientNetB0, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2 and VGG19, were compared and ensembled to improve the predictive performance by adopting the bagging strategy and weighted averaging. Quantitative experiments were conducted to evaluate the model on the DiaMOS Plant dataset, a self-collected dataset in the field. Data augmentation was adopted to improve the generalization of the model. The results, evaluated with a range of metrics, including accuracy, recall, precison and f1-score, showed that the proposed ensemble convolutional neural network outperformed the single convolutional neural network in classifying diseases in real field-condition with variation in brightness, disease similarity, complex background, and multiple leaves.