Detection of bacterial spot disease on tomato leaves using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)

Tomato diseases have become a major concern to the tomato production sector around the world. A huge proportion of tomato crops deteriorate yearly during growth or after harvesting due to the infections caused by fungus, viruses and bacteria. Early detection of these diseases plays a crucial role in alleviating overall production loss. Over the past decades, farmers have been using visual observation to identify a crop disease in a field. However, the visual observation method is labour intensive, time consuming, and prone to human error. Currently, intelligent approaches have been widely used to detect and classify these diseases. The objective of this study is to design a convolutional neural network VGG16 net architecture that is able to detect tomato diseases on tomato leaves. A model that can successfully detect 5 tomato leaf diseases was developed: (1) Bacterial spot, (2) Early blight, (3) Late blight, (4) Septoria leaf and (5) Yellow leaf curl with a training accuracy of 0.9328.