Soybean Plant Disease Identification Using Convolutional Neural Network

International audiencePlants have become an important source of energy, and are a fundamental piece in the puzzle to solve the problem of global warming. However, plant diseases are threatening the livelihood of this important source. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have demonstrated great performance (beating that of humans) in object recognition and image classification problems. This paper describes the feasibility of CNN for plant disease classification for leaf images taken under the natural environment. The model is designed based on the LeNet architecture to perform the soybean plant disease classification. 12,673 samples containing leaf images of four classes, including the healthy leaf images, were obtained from the PlantVillage database. The images were taken under uncontrolled environment. The implemented model achieves 99.32% classification accuracy which show clearly that CNN can extract important features and classify plant diseases from images taken in the natural environment