Abstract
Humans need food to sustain their lives. Therefore, agriculture is one of the most important issues in nations. Agriculture also plays a major role in the economic development of countries by increasing economic income. Early diagnosis of plant diseases is crucial for agricultural productivity and continuity. Early disease detection directly impacts the quality and quantity of crops. For this reason, many studies have been carried out on plant leaf disease classification. In this study, a simple and effective leaf disease classification method was developed. Disease classification was performed using seven state-of-the-art pretrained convolutional neural network architectures: VGG16, ResNet50, SqueezeNet, Xception, ShuffleNet, DenseNet121 and MobileNetV2. A simplified SqueezeNet model, GAPNet, was subsequently proposed for grape, apple and potato leaf disease classification. GAPNet was designed to be a lightweight and fast model with 337.872 parameters. To address the data imbalance between classes, oversampling was carried out using the synthetic minority oversampling technique. The proposed model achieves accuracy rates of 99.72%, 99.53%, and 99.83% for grape, apple and potato leaf disease classification, respectively. A success rate of 99.64% was achieved in multiplant leaf disease classification when the grape, apple and potato datasets were combined. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the lightweight GAPNet model produces promising results for various plant species.