Enhanced Deep Learning Architecture for Rapid and Accurate Tomato Plant Disease Diagnosis

Deep neural networks have demonstrated outstanding performances in agriculture production. Agriculture production is one of the most important sectors because it has a direct impact on the economy and social life of any society. Plant disease identification is a big challenge for agriculture production, for which we need a fast and accurate technique to identify plant disease. With the recent advancement in deep learning, we can develop a robust and accurate system. This research investigated the use of deep learning for accurate and fast tomato plant disease identification. In this research, we have used individual and merged datasets of tomato plants with 10 diseases (including healthy plants). The main aim of this work is to check the accuracy of the existing convolutional neural network models such as Visual Geometry Group, Residual Net, and DenseNet on tomato plant disease detection and then design a custom deep neural network model to give the best accuracy in case of the tomato plant. We have trained and tested our models with datasets containing over 18,000 and 25,000 images with 10 classes. We achieved over 99% accuracy with our custom model. This high accuracy was achieved with less training time and lower computational cost compared to other CNNs. This research demonstrates the potential of deep learning for efficient and accurate tomato plant disease detection, which can benefit farmers and contribute to improved agricultural production. The custom model's efficient performance makes it promising for practical implementation in real-world agricultural settings.