Automatic adaptive weighted fusion of features-based approach for plant disease identification

With the rapid expansion in plant disease detection, there has been a progressive increase in the demand for more accurate systems. In this work, we propose a new method combining color information, edge information, and textural information to identify diseases in 14 different plants. A novel 3-branch architecture is proposed containing the color information branch, an edge information branch, and a textural information branch extracting the textural information with the help of the central difference convolution network (CDCN). ResNet-18 was chosen as the base architecture of the deep neural network (DNN). Unlike the traditional DNNs, the weights adjust automatically during the training phase and provide the best of all the ratios. The experiments were performed to determine individual and combinational features’ contribution to the classification process. Experimental results of the PlantVillage database with 38 classes show that the proposed method has higher accuracy, i.e., 99.23%, than the existing feature fusion methods for plant disease identification.