Automatic Diagnosis of Soybean Leaf Disease by Transfer Learning

Soybean diseases and insect pests are important factors that affect the output and quality of soybeans, thus it is necessary to do correct inspection and diagnosis of them. For this reason, based on improved transfer learning, this study proposed a classification method for soybean leaf diseases. Firstly, leaves were segmented from the whole image after removing the complicated background images. Secondly, the data-augmented method was applied to amplify the separated leaf disease image dataset to reduce overfitting. At last, the automatically fine-tuning convolutional neural network (Autotun) was adopted to classify the soybean leaf diseases. The verification accuracy of the proposed method is 94.23, 93.51 and 94.91% on VGG-16, ResNet-34 and DenseNet-121 networks respectively. Compared with the traditional fine-tuning method of transfer learning, the results show that this method is better than the traditional transfer learning method.