Optimisation of Image Processing Technique for Potato Disease Detection

This study investigates the use of deep learning models, Visual Geometry Group 16-layer network (VGG16), AlexNet and a custom Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), for classifying potato leaf images into categories of Early Blight, Late Blight, and Healthy leaves. The dataset, comprising 3,293 images, combined locally sourced images from Anand Agricultural University (AAU), Gujarat, India, and images from the Plant Village (PV) repository. Various configurations were tested, including batch sizes of 32 and 64 and training epochs of 30 and 60. Results indicate that the custom CNN achieved the highest performance, with an accuracy of 98.8% and a low loss of 0.055, surpassing both VGG16 and AlexNet. Notably, the custom CNN required only 128,387 trainable parameters, significantly fewer than VGG16 (138 million) and AlexNet (58 million), highlighting its efficiency. This efficiency demonstrates the custom CNN’s optimized architecture, enabling high classification performance with lower computational demands.