Abstract
Plant disease is one of the issues that can create losses in the production and economy of the agricultural sector. Early detection of this disease for finding solutions and treatments is still a challenge in the sustainable agriculture field. Currently, image processing techniques and machine learning methods have been applied to detect plant diseases successfully. However, the effectiveness of these methods still needs to be improved, especially in multiclass plant diseases classification. In this paper, a convolutional neural network with a batch normalization-based deep learning approach for classifying plant diseases is used to develop an automatic diagnostic assistance system for leaf diseases. The significance of using deep learning technology is to make the system be end-to-end, automatic, accurate, less expensive, and more convenient to detect plant diseases from their leaves. For evaluating the proposed model, an experiment is conducted on a public dataset contains 20654 images with 15 plant diseases. The experimental validation results on 20% of the dataset showed that the model is able to classify the 15 plant diseases labels with 96.4% testing accuracy and 0.168 testing loss. These results confirmed the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed model for the plant disease detection task.