Mitigating Crop Losses: AI-enabled Disease Detection in Tomato Plants

Abstract

Fostering crop health is vital for global food security, underscoring the need for effective disease detection. This research introduces an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) model designed to enhance the detection and diagnosis of diseases in tomato plants, particularly focusing on Early Blight and Late Blight. Significantly, our model leverages cutting-edge image processing techniques to improve disease detection efficiency, outperforming traditional methods in terms of speed and accuracy. Our results demonstrate an impressive model accuracy of 92.58% on training data and 86.83% on validation data, showing the effectiveness of AI in diagnosing plant diseases. These high accuracy rates underline the potential of our model for timely disease classification, allowing for immediate and appropriate interventions. However, our research also identified a potential overfitting problem in the model’s performance. To address this, we propose using regularization and data augmentation techniques to enhance the model’s generalizability on unseen data. Additionally, we delve into inherent challenges that plague AI-based plant disease detection, such as the scarcity of diverse datasets and the difficulty of achieving broad generalizability across different plant species. In identifying potential solutions for these issues, our research lays the groundwork for the wider and more practical implementation of AI technologies in agriculture.