ISBN Number : 978-93-340-4197-2 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RECENT ADVANCES IN ENERGY EFFICIENT
COMPUTING AND COMMUNICATION FOR SMART SYSTEMS (ICRECS-2024)
IDENTIFICATION OF TOMATO PLANT DISEASES FROM IMAGES
USING INCEPTION V3
Dr. J. Annrose1, Midhun J2, Jeflin J3, Prince L J4 and Jenisto5
1,2,3,4,5
Department of Information Technology, St.Xavier’s Catholic College of Engineering, Chunkankadai
Abstract:
Accurate and early identification of tomato plant diseases is crucial for
enhancing sustainable agricultural productivity. This proactive
approach not only prevents the widespread propagation of diseases but
also significantly maximizes the yield and minimizes the associated
economic impacts. In traditional health management of tomato plants,
human experts are often employed to examine and diagnose anomalies
caused by various factors such as pests, pathogens, viruses, nutritional
deficiencies, and severe climatic conditions. This conventional method
heavily relies on the expertise and judgment of professional
agronomists, who manually inspect plants for symptoms of distress.
The limitations of human observation include scalability and potential
subjectivity, highlighting the need for an efficient, automated system.
Advanced artificial intelligence systems, particularly those based on
deep learning neural networks (DNNs), offer a robust solution by
processing large datasets of plant images to detect subtle patterns that
may elude human inspectors. Specifically, the use of a Convolutional
Neural Network (CNN) model, compared to a traditional Support
Vector Machine (SVM) approach, demonstrates a clear advantage.
While the SVM might achieve an accuracy of approximately 80% with
extensive feature engineering and tuning, the CNN model can
autonomously learn from raw image data and has been shown to reach
accuracy levels above 95%. These metrics significantly highlight the
technological advancement and superior capability of deep learning
methods over classical machine learning techniques. This automation
not only enhances diagnostic accuracy but also significantly speeds up
the disease identification process, enabling timely interventions.
Keywords:
Tomato Plant Diseases, Deep Learning, Convolutional Neural
Networks, Machine Learning, Disease Detection, Agricultural
Technology, Sustainable Agriculture
1. INTRODUCTION
The tomato is one of the most important crops in the world of
horticulture, valued for its high nutritional content and
widespread use across the globe. It is the most produced
vegetable in the world, with an annual yield of more than 182
million tonnes. Major producers include China, India, and the
United States, underscoring the tomato's integral role in both
developed and developing economies. Specifically, tomato
production spans more than 793,000 hectares in India, where
close to 19 million tonnes of tomatoes are produced annually,
making India the world's second-largest producer. The
ST.XAVIER’S CATHOLIC COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, CHUNKANKADAI, TAMILNADU, INDIA
412
agricultural industry and the stability of local economies in these
regions depend significantly on this substantial productivity.
Tomato cultivation is frequently compromised by a range of
diseases and pests, posing significant risks to both yield and
quality. Diseases such as bacterial spot, early blight, late blight,
leaf mold, powdery mildew, and septoria leaf spot, alongside pest
infestations like spider mites, and viral infections including target
spot, tomato mosaic virus, and tomato yellow leaf curl virus, can
lead to yield losses between 10 to 30 percent. The extent of these
losses largely depends on the severity of the infection and the
timeliness of management responses. These agricultural
challenges not only affect the livelihoods of millions of farmers
but also have profound implications for global food security and
market stability.
Traditionally, the health management of tomato plants has
involved manual inspections conducted by agronomists. Although
this approach benefits from human expertise, it is labor-intensive
and subject to human error, making it difficult to scale
effectively. This is especially problematic in the context of
increasing agricultural demands and the challenges posed by
climate change. Such limitations highlight the need for more
advanced, scalable solutions that can enhance accuracy and
efficiency in disease management.
The introduction of machine learning technologies, such as
Support Vector Machines (SVM), marked an initial step toward
automating the diagnosis of plant diseases. SVMs utilize
algorithms to classify diseases based on manually extracted image
features. However, these methods have significant limitations—
they require extensive preprocessing and do not scale effectively
across large datasets, making them less suitable for
comprehensive agricultural applications.
The transition to deep learning, particularly through the use of
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), has revolutionized the
field of plant disease diagnosis. CNNs automate the process of
feature extraction and learning, allowing for the direct analysis of
raw image data. This capability significantly enhances the
accuracy and efficiency of disease pattern identification. In
ISBN Number : 978-93-340-4197-2 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RECENT ADVANCES IN ENERGY EFFICIENT
COMPUTING AND COMMUNICATION FOR SMART SYSTEMS (ICRECS-2024)
comparative studies, CNNs have demonstrated superior
performance, achieving accuracy rates exceeding 95%, which is a
substantial improvement over the approximately 80% accuracy
typically achieved by SVMs. This shift not only improves the
diagnostic capabilities but also scales effectively to accommodate
large datasets common in agricultural monitoring, representing a
significant advancement in the field of plant health management.
The integration of advanced AI technologies such as the
Inception V3 model not only refines the accuracy of disease
identification in tomato plants but also accelerates the diagnostic
process. This rapid detection facilitates timely interventions that
can mitigate the spread of diseases and decrease potential yield
losses, thereby supporting sustainable agriculture by fostering
healthier crops, reducing the reliance on chemical treatments, and
enhancing economic stability within farming communities.
Despite the advancements in disease identification
technologies, early detection of tomato plant diseases remains
challenging due to the subtle differences between affected and
unaffected areas. The complexity is compounded by factors such
as variations in leaf size, changes in lighting conditions, and the
presence of visual noise.
To address these challenges, our proposed methodology
employs the Inception V3 model, optimized to achieve an
impressive accuracy rate of 98.45% on the PlantVillage dataset.
This dataset is comprehensive, encompassing a wide range of
symptoms across various disease stages, which allows the model
to learn and predict with exceptional precision. Through this
advanced approach, we significantly enhance the reliability and
automation of tomato plant health management, paving the way
for more effective disease control strategies that can adapt to the
diverse and dynamic nature of agricultural environments.
2. RELATED REVIEW
G. Prince, J.P proposed these approaches have been applied for
the classification of tomato powdery mildew against healthy
leaves using thermal and stereo images [1]
K. P. Ferentinos proposed and discussed convolutional neural
networks models that were developed to perform plant disease
detection and diagnosis using simple leaves images of healthy and
diseased plants. Training of the models was performed with the
use of an open database of 87,848 images containing 25 different
plants in a set of 58 distinct classes of [plant, disease]
combinations including healthy plants [2]
Sladojevic et al. proposed a novel approach based on deep
convolutional networks to detect plant disease. By discriminating
the plant leaves from their surroundings, 13 common different
ST.XAVIER’S CATHOLIC COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, CHUNKANKADAI, TAMILNADU, INDIA
413
types of plant diseases were recognized by the proposed CNN-
based model. The experimental results showed that the proposed
CNN-based model can achieve a good recognition performance,
and obtained an average accuracy of 96.3% [3].
Mohanty et al. developed a CNN-based model to detect 26
diseases and 14 crop species. Using a public dataset of 54,306
images of diseased and healthy plant leaves, the proposed model
was trained and achieved an accuracy of 99.35% [4].
Shijie Jia has developed a CNN model with transfer learning
and VGG16 for the identification of pests and diseases in tomato
plants. In the original work, VGG16 was trained to identify a
thousand categories with 1.26 million images. The author
collected 7040 images from China which contain (leaf curl, leaf
mold, late blight, bacterial spot, septoria leaf spot, target spot,
spider mites, gray spot, mosaic virus, and healthy) categories with
640 images each, to identify different tomato diseases and pests
VGG16 extracts features from raw images and combined with
SVM for the classification of diseases. The overall system
performance relies, however, on fairly high-quality images but
not low-quality images.[5]
In [6] the author collected 5000 images from different farms in
the Korean Peninsula. The author wanted to detect and identify
tomato disease and pest classes with the location in images by
seeking a better deep-learning architecture. The author considered
faster R-CNN [13], SSD [14], and R-FCN [15] with various
feature extractors (VGGnet, ResNet). Moreover, the author
suggested data augmentation to decrease false positives in
training and to improve accuracy. The system was able to identify
gray mold, pest, leaf mold, leaf miner, canker, powdery mildew,
low temperature, nutritional deficiency, and whitefly. Because of
a smaller number of annotated samples, certain classes with large
differences in patterns appear to be confused with similar diseases
and cause false positives.
The author in [7] used 9000 images of infected and healthy
tomato leaves that had been taken in the laboratory to classify five
diseases from the PlantVillage dataset (leaf curl, bacterial spot,
septoria leaf spot, early blight, and leaf mold). For data
visualization, the full-color model was able to classify disease
spots, while the grayscale model learned leaf shapes and visual
patterns of the diseases. Whereas the full-color model achieved
more accuracy compared with the grayscale model. Images were
taken under controlled conditions for the PlantVillage dataset
which holds a drawback of the model.
3. PROPOSED METHOD
The objective of our proposed model is to utilize the advanced
capabilities of the Inception V3 model for classifying and
ISBN Number : 978-93-340-4197-2 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RECENT ADVANCES IN ENERGY EFFICIENT
COMPUTING AND COMMUNICATION FOR SMART SYSTEMS (ICRECS-2024)

detecting anomalies in tomato plants at early stages. This
methodology automates the traditional manual inspection process
by utilizing the Inception V3 model.
By incorporating these advanced features, the Inception V3
model not only excels at recognizing complex image features but
also proves efficient in computation, making it an ideal choice for
real-time and large-scale agricultural applications where rapid and
accurate disease detection is crucial. This enhances the potential
for early intervention, significantly reducing the spread and
impact of diseases on tomato crops.

Fig 2. The architecture of Inception V3

3.2 DATASET DESCRIPTION

Disease Name Images Train Test

Images Images

Bacterial Spot 3557 2825 732

Early Blight 3097 2454 643

Healthy 3856 3051 805

Late Blight 3914 3122 792

Leaf Mold 3493 2754 739

Fig:1. The proposed Inception V3 model Powdery 1256 1004 252
Mildew
3.1 MODEL ARCHITECTURE
Septoria Leaf 3628 2882 746
The Inception V3 model incorporates a modular architecture, Spot
which features stacked inception modules. Each module
comprises parallel towers with convolutions of different sizes Spider Mite 2182 1747 435
(1x1, 3x3, and 5x5), enabling the network to capture spatial infestations
hierarchies in the data across various scales. This is particularly
advantageous for identifying subtle and distinct patterns in tomato Target Spot 2284 1827 457
plant imagery, crucial for detecting early-stage disease symptoms
that appear in small, localized areas. Tomato Mosaic 2737 2153 584
Virus
Additionally, the model integrates batch normalization and
side branches, enhancing the training process and reducing the Tomato Yellow 2525 2036 489
risk of overfitting. Batch normalization normalizes the inputs for Leaf Curl Virus
each layer, re-centering and re-scaling to stabilize learning,
thereby expediting training and enhancing model performance. Total 32,079 25,855 6,224
Table 1. A description of the tomato plant disease data set

ST.XAVIER’S CATHOLIC COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, CHUNKANKADAI, TAMILNADU, INDIA

414
ISBN Number : 978-93-340-4197-2 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RECENT ADVANCES IN ENERGY EFFICIENT
COMPUTING AND COMMUNICATION FOR SMART SYSTEMS (ICRECS-2024)

The PlantVillage dataset is used to train the model. The
dataset encompasses a total of 32,079 images, specifically
categorized as follows: 3,557 for Bacterial Spot, 3,097 for Early
Blight, 3,856 for Healthy plants, 3,914 for Late Blight, 3,493 for
Leaf Mold, 1,256 for Powdery Mildew, 3,628 for Septoria Leaf
Spot, 2,182 for Spider Mite infestations, 2,284 for Target Spot,
2,737 for Tomato Mosaic Virus, and 2,525 for Tomato Yellow
Leaf Curl Virus. This extensive collection enables precise training
of the model, ensuring high accuracy in the detection and
diagnosis of plant diseases.The Inception V3 model was trained
using this dataset to refine its ability to analyze and classify
complex image data efficiently. This training allows the model to
recognize subtle deviations from the norms, such as slight
discoloration or minor leaf deformities, often imperceptible in
early-stage disease conditions.
3.3 DATA PREPROCESSING
TensorFlow. For optimization, we use Stochastic Gradient
Descent (SGD) as the optimizer with a learning rate of 0.0001
and momentum of 0.9, which are chosen for their ability to
provide stable and effective learning outcomes. The loss function
employed is categorical cross-entropy, which is ideal for multi-
class classification tasks, and we monitor the model’s
performance using accuracy as a metric.
3.6 FINE-TUNING THE MODEL
After the initial training utilizing ImageNet weights, the
model enters a fine-tuning phase. This involves freezing the pre-
trained layers initially while the top layers are trained to adapt the
model to new classes, effectively tailoring it to our specific task.
Subsequently, we unfreeze and train deeper layers from 249
onwards, employing a reduced learning rate of 0.00001, to allow
for more refined adjustments to the model parameters.

The preprocessing steps applied to the PlantVillage dataset 4.RESULT AND DISCUSSION
include:
This section presents the results obtained from deploying the
1. Image Resizing: Images are resized to 299x299 pixels to Inception V3 model for the early detection of tomato plant
fit the input requirement of the Inception V3 model. diseases. The analysis centers on the model's performance, as
2. Normalization: Pixel values are normalized between 0 reflected in the training and validation accuracy and loss graphs,
and 1 to facilitate efficient training. alongside a detailed confusion matrix.
3. Data Augmentation: Techniques such as rotation, zoom,
The initial training phase showcased a rapid increase in model
and horizontal flipping are used to augment the data,
accuracy, reaching around 75% training accuracy. Subsequently,
enhancing model robustness and generalization.
during the fine-tuning phase, both training and validation
accuracy significantly improved, with validation accuracy
3.4 ENVIRONMENT SETUP peaking at 84%. This improvement indicates that fine-tuning the
deeper layers effectively tailored the pre-trained network to the
The model development and execution are managed within a
specifics of the tomato disease dataset.
Conda environment to ensure all dependencies are maintained
consistently. Python 3.10 is used to ensure compatibility with the
latest libraries and APIs. A specific Conda environment is created
for this project, which helps in managing dependencies more
effectively. All necessary libraries are installed through Conda,
which include tensorflow-gpu==2.8 to leverage GPU
acceleration, numpy for numerical operations, matplotlib and
seaborn for plotting and visualizations, and scikit-learn for
various machine learning utilities. Additionally, CUDA 11 and
cuDNN 8 are configured to optimize and accelerate deep learning
computations on NVIDIA GPUs. This setup not only facilitates
faster training times and more efficient computation but also
ensures that all packages are compatible and function seamlessly
together, simplifying the setup process on any machine equipped
with Conda.

3.5 TRAINING AND OPTIMIZATION

The training of the model takes place in a high-performance

Fig 3. Initial Training and Validation Accuracy
computing environment equipped with NVIDIA GPUs, utilizing

ST.XAVIER’S CATHOLIC COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, CHUNKANKADAI, TAMILNADU, INDIA

415
ISBN Number : 978-93-340-4197-2 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RECENT ADVANCES IN ENERGY EFFICIENT
COMPUTING AND COMMUNICATION FOR SMART SYSTEMS (ICRECS-2024)

Fig 6. Fine Tuned Training and Validation Loss

5. CONCLUSION
This study demonstrates the effective use of the Inception V3
model for the early detection of tomato plant diseases, automating
the inspection process and enhancing detection accuracy. The
architecture, enhanced with batch normalization and data
Fig 4. Initial Training and Validation Loss
augmentation, identifies subtle disease patterns that are critical for
early intervention. The results highlight the model's accuracy and
pinpoint areas for improvement in distinguishing between similar
diseases. Future work aims to expand the model's ability to work
with various plant species.

6. REFERENCE

[1] G.Prince, J.P. Clarkson, N.M. Rajpoot, “Automatic detection

of diseased tomato plants using thermal and stereo visible light
images,” 2015.

[2] K. P. Ferentinos, "Deep Learning models for plant disease

detection and diagnosis," 2018.

[3] S. Sladojevic, M. Arsenovic, A. Anderla, D. Culibrk and D.

Stefanovic, “Deep neural networks based recognition of plant
diseases by leaf image classification,” 2016.

[4] S. Mohanty, D. Hughes and S. Marcel, “Using deep learning

for image-based plant disease detection,” 2016.

Fig 5. Fine Tuned Training and Validation Accuracy [5] Shijie, Jia, Jia Peiyi, and Hu Siping. "Automatic detection of
tomato diseases and pests based on leaf images." 2017 Chinese
Automation Congress (CAC). IEEE, 2017.

ST.XAVIER’S CATHOLIC COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, CHUNKANKADAI, TAMILNADU, INDIA

416
ISBN Number : 978-93-340-4197-2 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RECENT ADVANCES IN ENERGY EFFICIENT
COMPUTING AND COMMUNICATION FOR SMART SYSTEMS (ICRECS-2024)

[6] Fuentes, Alvaro, et al. "A robust deep-learning-based detector

for real-time tomato plant diseases and pests recognition."
Sensors 17.9 (2017): 2022.

[7] Ashqar, Belal AM, and Samy S. Abu-Naser. "Image-Based

Tomato Leaves Diseases Detection Using Deep Learning."
(2018).

ST.XAVIER’S CATHOLIC COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, CHUNKANKADAI, TAMILNADU, INDIA

417