Analysis of Tomato Leaf Disease Identification Techniques

India loses thousands of metric tons of tomato crop every year due to pests and diseases. Tomato leaf disease is a major issue that causes significant losses to farmers and possess a threat to the agriculture sector. Understanding how does an algorithm learn to classify different types of tomato leaf disease will help scientist and engineers built accurate models for tomato leaf disease detection. Convolutional neural networks with backpropagation algorithms have achieved great success in diagnosing various plant diseases. However, human benchmarks in diagnosing plant disease have still not been displayed by any computer vision method. Under different conditions, the accuracy of the plant identification system is much lower than expected by algorithms. This study performs analysis on features learned by the backpropagation algorithm and studies the state-of-the-art results achieved by image-based classification methods. The analysis is shown through gradient-based visualization methods. In our analysis, the most descriptive approach to generated attention maps is Grad-CAM. Moreover, it is also shown that using a different learning algorithm than backpropagation is also possible to achieve comparable accuracy to that of deep learning models. Hence, state-of-the-art results might show that Convolutional Neural Network achieves human comparable accuracy in tomato leaf disease classification through supervised learning. But, both genetic algorithms and semi-supervised models hold the potential to built precise systems for tomato leaf detection.