Early Leaf Disease Detection of Soybean Plants using Convolution Neural Network Algorithm

Agricultural specialists usually examine leaves closely to check for plant diseases, that process takes a long time and can have errors. To overcome these problems, nowadays, machine learning methods, specifically sequential convolution neural networks (CNN) are widely used, because of their extensive potential to extract features and patterns from the image dataset.

This study introduces a complete methodology for detecting diseases in soybean plants by employing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). A dataset sourced from the Mendeley database, containing images of soybean legume crops affected by caterpillars, Diabrotica Speciosa diseases and undamaged (healthy) foliage is used., The research explores the efficacy of the CNN Model in accurately classifying these diseases. The CNN algorithm is trained in such a way that it can handle the complex nature of soybean leaf imaging by utilizing convolutional layers for extracting features, pooling layers for reducing dimensionality and softmax layers for classification.

The training and validation results exhibit remarkable accuracy rates (97.64% accuracy) after 150 epochs. The evaluation metrics, such as precision, recall and F1-score, demonstrate the model’s performance across different leaf diseases of soybean, suggesting its ability to accurately identify instances inside each category. The classification matrices provide complete knowledge of the accuracy of the prediction of different diseases. The overall accuracy of the proposed model is 94.05%. This study can be utilized as a reference to increase the progress of agricultural disease detection, in turn, can enable enhance the reduction of crop losses and ensure food security.