Tomato leaf diseases recognition based on improved Multi-Scale AlexNet

Abstract: The symptoms of the same tomato disease in different stages are obviously different, and different diseases show some similarities. Traditional pattern recognition methods can not reflect the dynamic changes of the pathological characterization, and the practicability is poor. To solve this problem, this paper proposed a Multi-Scale AlexNet recognition model for mobile platform based on convolutional neural network (CNN), and implemented a tomato leaf disease image recognition system for agricultural workers based on Android. Many parameters and large memory utilization of traditional AlexNet model are unfit for mobile platform, this paper adjusted the network structure of the traditional model by removing the local response normalization(LRN) layer, modifying the full connection layer, setting up different convolution kernel extraction features, designed a multi- scale recognition model based on the AlexNet. The model consists of 6 layers. It can optimize the training time and memory utilization and achieve high precision. After removing the LRN layer, there was a 30% decrease in running time. Extending the single convolution kernel into multi-scale (1 ( 1,3 ( 3,5 ( 5,7 ( 7) convolution kernel then fused at the first layer, removing full connection layer 6 and 7, and taking the place of global average pooling layer, then the model size was only 30.2 M. The forward propagation rate (FRP) and backward propagation rate (BPR) were reduced, and the global average pooling is better than the global maximum pooling on recognition accuracy. So the Multi-Scale AlexNet model used global average pooling in the 5th layer. In image preprocessing phase, in order to avoiding over fitting of the trained model caused by the unbalanced distribution of sample numbers, we had zoomed, flipped, color jittering, add noise and rotated the original pictures of dataset randomly to get the augmented dataset, and used 70% of the pictures as the train dataset and the rest as the validation dataset(20%) and test dataset(10%). These pictures were quantized to 224 ( 224 dpi for Multi-Scale AlexNet training, and the original dataset and augmented dataset were used to train models. In order to validate the performance of the proposed model, comparative tests were done between Multi-Scale AlexNet and traditional pattern recognition method. It repeated 600 tests. The results showed that the CNN model achieved 92.7%, the high average recognition accuracy of each disease and each disease in the early, middle and late stages. Compared with the other CNN Net model(MobileNet, SequeezeNet, LeNet-5), the Multi-Scale AlexNet achieved the highest recognition accuracy, and reached 95.8% on the late stage disease dataset, but the SequeezeNet model used less memory. The MobileNet and SequeezeNet model reached lower recognition accuracy on the middle and late stages dataset, that because their convolution size was small. The recognition system was implemented on Android platform, and then test was done on field dataset. The results showed that the average recognition accuracy was 89.2%, its less value was due to the complex background of image. Then the system can meet the requirements of disease image recognition on mobile platform in production practice. The research results provide a method for disease image recognition based on convolution neural network, and provide a reference for automatic identification of crop diseases and engineering applications.