Transfer Learning-Based Framework for Classification of Pest in Tomato Plants

Pest in the plant is a major challenge in the agriculture sector. Hence, early and accurate detection and classification of pests could help in precautionary measures while substantially reducing economic losses. Recent developments in deep convolutional neural network (CNN) have drastically improved the accuracy of image recognition systems. In this paper, we have presented a transfer learning of pre-trained deep CNN-based framework for classification of pest in tomato plants. The dataset for this study has been collected from online sources that consist of 859 images categorized into 10 classes. This study is first of its kind where: (i) dataset with 10 classes of tomato pest are involved; (ii) an exhaustive comparison of the performance of 15 pre-trained deep CNN models has been presented on tomato pest classification. The experimental results show that the highest classification accuracy of 88.83% has been obtained using DenseNet169 model. Further, the encouraging results of transfer learning-based models demonstrate its effectiveness in pest detection and classification tasks.