Maize leaf disease classification using convolutional neural networks and hyperparameter optimization

Maize is an important food crop in the world, but several diseases affect the quality and quantity of agricultural production. Identifying these diseases is a very subjective and time-consuming task. The use of computer vision techniques allows automatizing this task and is essential in agricultural applications. In this study, we assess the performance of three state-of-the-art convolutional neural network architectures to classify maize leaf diseases. We apply enhancement methods such as Bayesian hyperparameter optimization, data augmentation, and fine-tuning strategies. We evaluate these CNNs on the maize leaf images from PlantVillage dataset, and all experiments were validated using a five-fold cross-validation procedure over the training and test sets. Our findings include the correlation between the maize leaf classes and the impact of data augmentation in pre-trained models. The results show that maize leaf disease classification reached 97% of accuracy for all CNNs models evaluated. Also, our approach provides new perspectives for the identification of leaf diseases based on computer vision strategies.