Abstract
Plant diseases are a critical threat to the agricultural sector. Therefore, accurate plant disease classification is important. In recent years, some researchers have used synthetic images of GAN to enhance plant disease recognition accuracy. In this paper, we propose a generative adversarial classified network (GACN) to further improve plant disease recognition accuracy. The GACN comprises a generator, discriminator, and classifier. The proposed model can not only enhance convolutional neural network performance by generating synthetic images to balance plant disease datasets but the GACN classifier can also be directly applied to plant disease recognition tasks. Experimental results on the PlantVillage and AI Challenger 2018 datasets show that the contribution of the proposed method to improve the discriminability of the convolution neural network is greater than that of the label-conditional methods of CGAN, ACGAN, BAGAN, and MFC-GAN. The accuracy of the trained classifier for plant disease recognition is also better than that of the plant disease recognition models studied on public plant disease datasets. In addition, we conducted several experiments to observe the effects of different numbers and resolutions of synthetic images on the discriminability of convolutional neural network.