Aggrotech: Leveraging Deep Learning for Sustainable Tomato Disease Management

Abstract: Tomato crop health plays a critical role in ensuring agricultural productivity and food security. Timely and accurate detection of diseases affecting tomato plants is vital for effective disease management. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based approach for Tomato Leaf Disease Detection using two well-established convolutional neural networks (CNNs), namely VGG19 and Inception v3. The experiment is conducted on the Tomato Villages Dataset, encompassing images of both healthy tomato leaves and leaves afflicted by various diseases. The VGG19 model is augmented with fully connected layers, while the Inception v3 model is modified to incorporate a global average pooling layer and a dense classification layer. Both models are trained on the prepared dataset, and their performances are evaluated on a separate test set. This research employs VGG19 and Inception v3 models on the Tomato Villages dataset (4525 images) for tomato leaf disease detection. The models' accuracy of 93.93% with dropout layers demonstrates their usefulness for crop health monitoring. The paper suggests a deep learning-based strategy that includes normalization, resizing, dataset preparation, and unique model architectures. During training, VGG19 and Inception v3 serve as feature extractors, with possible data augmentation and fine-tuning. Metrics like accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score are obtained through evaluation on a test set and offer important insights into the strengths and shortcomings of the model. The method has the potential for practical use in precision agriculture and could help tomato crops prevent illness early on.