Classification of Apple Disease Based on Non-Linear Deep Features

Diseases in apple orchards (rot, scab, and blotch) worldwide cause a substantial loss in the agricultural industry. Traditional hand picking methods are subjective to human efforts. Conventional machine learning methods for apple disease classification depend on hand-crafted features that are not robust and are complex. Advanced artificial methods such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN’s) have become a promising way for achieving higher accuracy although they need a high volume of samples. This work investigates different Deep CNN (DCNN) applications to apple disease classification using deep generative images to obtain higher accuracy. In order to achieve this, our work progressively modifies a baseline model by using an end-to-end trained DCNN model that has fewer parameters, better recognition accuracy than existing models (i.e., ResNet, SqeezeNet, and MiniVGGNet). We have performed a comparative study with state-of-the-art CNN as well as conventional methods proposed in the literature, and comparative results confirm the superiority of our proposed model.