Tomato pest classification using deep convolutional neural network with transfer learning, fine tuning and scratch learning

Pests are major threat to economic growth of a country. Application of pesticide is the easiest way to control the pest infection. However, excessive utilization of pesticide is hazardous to environment. The recent advances in deep learning have paved the way for early detection and improved classification of pest in tomato plants which will benefit the farmers. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of 11 state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models with three configurations: transfers learning, fine-tuning and scratch learning. The training in transfer learning and fine tuning initiates from pre-trained weights whereas random weights are used in case of scratch learning. In addition, the concept of data augmentation has been explored to improve the performance. Our dataset consists of 859 tomato pest images from 10 categories. The results demonstrate that the highest classification accuracy of 94.87% has been achieved in the transfer learning approach by DenseNet201 model with data augmentation.