Feature fusion based artificial neural network model for disease detection of bean leaves

Plant diseases reduce yield and quality in agricultural production by 20–40%. Leaf diseases cause 42% of agricultural production losses. Image processing techniques based on artificial neural networks are used for the non-destructive detection of leaf diseases on the plant. Since leaf diseases have a complex structure, it is necessary to increase the accuracy and generalizability of the developed machine learning models. In this study, an artificial neural network model for bean leaf disease detection was developed by fusing descriptive vectors obtained from bean leaves with HOG (Histogram Oriented Gradient) feature extraction and transfer learning feature extraction methods. The model using feature fusion has higher accuracy than only HOG feature extraction and only transfer learning feature extraction models. Also, the feature fusion model converged to the solution faster. Feature fusion model had 98.33, 98.40 and 99.24% accuracy in training, validation, and test datasets, respectively. The study shows that the proposed method can effectively capture interclass distinguishing features faster and more accurately.