Neural Computing and Applications, cilt.36, sa.2, ss.803-822, 2024 (SCI-Expanded)
Deep learning techniques have gained immense popularity recently because of their remarkable capacity to learn complex patterns and features from large datasets. These techniques have revolutionized many fields by achieving advanced performance in various tasks. The availability of large datasets and the advancement of computing resources have enabled deep learning models to perform well in solving challenging problems. As a result, they have become an essential tool in many industries, including agriculture. The application of deep learning in agriculture has great potential for increasing productivity, reducing costs, and improving sustainability by aiding in the early identification and prevention of plant leaf diseases, optimizing crop yields, and facilitating precision agriculture. This paper suggests using a novel approach to automatically classify multi-class leaf diseases in tomatoes using a deep multi-scale convolutional neural network (DMCNN). The proposed DMCNN architecture consists of parallel streams of convolutional neural networks at different scales, which get merged at the end to form a single output. The images of tomato leaves are preprocessed using data augmentation techniques and fed into the DMCNN model to classify disease. The proposed approach is evaluated on a dataset of tomato plant images containing 10 distinct classes of diseases and compared with different existing models. The research results reveal that the suggested DMCNN model performs better than other models in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Furthermore, the proposed model reported an overall accuracy of 99.1%, which is higher than the accuracy of existing models tested on the same dataset. The study demonstrates the potential of deep learning techniques for automated disease classification in agriculture, which can aid in early disease detection and prevent crop loss.