Optimizing deep learning models for plant leaf disease classification using nature-inspired algorithms

Abstract

Plant diseases greatly affect agricultural production, especially in developing countries, where prompt diagnosis can be quite challenging due to the limited availability of experts in real-time. Deep learning techniques for image analysis is gaining popularity and are increasingly considered an alternative to traditional manual inspection of plants. This research presents the evaluation of plant leaf disease detection system based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) optimized with different nature-inspired algorithms. The backbone model is based on the EfficientNet-B0 pretrained on ImageNet. Therefore, transfer learning is used to adapt the model to an updated PlantVillage dataset. Experiments have been conducted with multiple nature-inspired algorithms to improve generalisation and training efficiency of the prediction model. Different data preparation techniques have been carefully applied to the dataset, creating a unified approach to ensure consistency in the preprocessing pipeline for the training, validation, and testing phases. Our experiments indicate that application of the grey wolf optimizer (GWO) for tuning key hyperparameters of the model, including dropout, learning rates, and weight decay produced the best results, with and accuracy around 99.45%.