Deep Convolutional Neural Network based Detection System for Real-time Corn Plant Disease Recognition

Abstract

Corn is one of the most popular food grains in the India and crop loss due to diseases substantially affects the Indian economy and threatens the food availability. Recent access of smart devices can be utilized to provide automatic diagnosis of corn diseases and prevent severe crop losses. This paper presents a real time method based on deep convolutional neural network for corn leaf disease recognition. Deep neural network performance is improved by tuning the hyper-parameters and adjusting the pooling combinations on a system with GPU. Further, the number of parameters of the developed model is optimized to make it suitable for real time inference. The pre-trained deep CNN model was deployed onto raspberry pi 3 using Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick consisting dedicated CNN hardware blocks. During the recognition of corn leaf diseases, the deep learning model achieves an accuracy of 88.46% demonstrating the feasibility of this method. The presented corn plant disease recognition model is capable of running on standalone smart devices like raspberry-pi or smart-phone and drones.