Maize Crop Disease Detection Using CNN

Badri Sushruth Vemuri Rani Mounika

Hyderabad, India Accenture, India
+919393480772 +91-9884132931
sushruth.badri@gmail.com vemuri.rmc@gmail.com

Abstract
In the ​context of misdiagnosis or late diagnosis of diseases, particularly in corn crops, this paper attempts to propose a
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model to detect the type of disease from the images of the leaves of the crops.
Maize is a staple food crop grown all over the world. Understanding the issue of identifying the diseases in the crops
is very important since it helps the farmer to decide what steps are to be taken to increase the productivity of the
crops.
CNN – ​Convolutional Neural Network

To overcome these shortcomings, we train a CNN model to

I. C​ONTEXT
India supports approximately 16 percent of the world’s total
population in close to 2.5 percent of the world’s geographical
area which causes a significant pressure on natural resources.
With the growing population, this pressure is only going to
increase. Increasing the cultivable land proportional to the
increase in population is not practical as increasing population
also increases the demand for habitable land. This disparity
can be better addressed by increasing the productivity of the
crops.
In India, every year diseases and pests eat away 20-30% of
food on an average, worth nearly Rs. 45000 crores.
Worldwide, the damages caused by fungi to maize, wheat and
rice alone costs $60 billion per year and the diseases caused
by fungi destroys about 125 million tonnes of wheat, maize,
rice, maize and soya beans each year.
help the farmer make a faster and more accurate diagnosis to
aid him in eradicating the disease and prevent the crop losses.
We use the images from the ‘PlantVillage Dataset’ to train our
Neural Network model.
III. S​OLUTION​ O​UTLINE
Dataset: ​The “PlantVillage Dataset” is a dataset of diseased
plant leaves and their corresponding labels. It consists of
54303 images of healthy and unhealthy leaf images divided
into 38 categories by disease and species. In this paper we
have used the images pertaining to the maize/corn crop. It
consists of 4 categories:
● Healthy
● Cercospora_leaf_spot Gray_leaf_spot
● Common_rust
● Northern_Leaf_Blight

Identifying these diseases to use the right type of pesticides

and pest control methods would go a long way to contribute
towards increasing the productivity of the crops.

II. P​ROBLEM​ S​COPING

Identifying the type of crop ​disease requires a considerable

amount of time and resources since it includes sending the
sample for testing in a laboratory and waiting for the results.
This time may prove to be vital for the farmer as the disease
may destroy the crops by the time the results have arrived.
Moreover, the farmers may opt to make their own diagnosis
which may result in misdiagnosis and prove detrimental to the
productivity of the crops. Fig 1 Image of healthy leaf in dataset
 parameters in the model which are fine tuned during the
training to get the best possible output.
The size of the input layer is 256x256x3 and the output layer
consists of 4 neurons.

Fig 2 Image of leaf with ​common rust​ in dataset

Training Method: ​We train a ​CNN model using TensorFlow

and Kerasl in this paper. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)
is a Deep Learning algorithm which can take an image as its
input. It can assign learnable weights and biases to various
aspects of an image and can differentiate one image from
another.

Fig 3 Architecture of the ​CNN model​ used

Architecture​: The architecture we used consisted of 3

Convolutional layers each of which is followed by a max
pooling layer. It is then followed by a flatten layer followed
by 4 dense layers. Each layer is accompanied by an activation
layer. The activation function for the last layer is Softmax
whereas the activation function used for all the intermediate
layers is ReLu. There are a total of 60,211,396 trainable Fig 4 Flow Chart showing input and output sizes of each layer
Results​: After training the network for 30 epochs with 80
steps per epoch and a batch size of 30, we have achieved a R​ESEARCH​ R​EFERENCES
train and validation accuracy of almost 96 percent. The loss
for training and validation sets were close to 0.1
[1] - Patra, S., Mishra, P., Mahapatra, S.C. et al. Modelling impacts of chemical
fertilizer on agricultural production: a case study on Hooghly district, West Bengal,
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s40808-016-0223-6
[2] -​ https://www.britannica.com/science/plant-disease/Chemical-control
[3] - ​https://plantvillage.psu.edu/topics/corn-maize/infos
[4] -Dhaliwal, G.S. & Arora, Ramesh & Dhawan, Ashok. (2004). Crop losses due
to insect pests in Indian agriculture: An update. Indian Journal of Ecology. 31. 1-7.
[5]-​http://croplifeindia.org/indian-agriculture-growth-and-crop-protection-industry/

Fig 5 A​ccuracy graph for model training

Fig 6 Loss ​graph for model training

From the above training graphs we ​can conclude that the result
of the project is satisfactory and the model can be deployed to be
used by the farmers to self diagnose their maize crops with high
accuracy in a very less amount of time.

IV. F​UTURE​ S​cope

Currently we are working on an Android App, into whi​ch we

can deploy this model using TensorFlow Lite. This will allow the user
to conveniently use the model anywhere in the world through their
android mobile device even without internet access. After that we
are planning to include the diagnosis for a wide variety of crops. This
application can help a lot of farmers around the world to increase
the productivity of their crops.