Multi-Class Classification of Plant Leaf Diseases Using Feature Fusion of Deep Convolutional Neural Network and Local Binary Pattern

Plant diseases are one of the primary causes of decreased agricultural production quality and quantity. With ongoing changes in plant structure and cultivation techniques, new diseases are constantly arising on plant leaves. Thus, accurate classification and detection of plant leaf diseases in their early stages will limit the spread of the infection and support the healthy development of plant production. This work proposes a novel lightweight deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model for obtaining high-level hidden feature representations. The deep features are then fused with traditional handcrafted local binary pattern (LBP) features to capture local texture information in plant leaf images. The proposed model is trained and tested on three publicly available datasets (Apple Leaf, Tomato Leaf, and Grape Leaf). On the three datasets, the proposed approach achieves 99%, 96.6%, and 98.5% validation accuracies, respectively, and 98.8%, 96.5%, and 98.3% test accuracies, respectively. The results of the experiments show that the proposed approach can provide a better control solution for plant diseases.