ResTS: Residual Deep interpretable architecture for plant disease detection

Recently many methods have been induced for plant disease detection by the influence of Deep Neural Networks in Computer Vision. However, the dearth of transparency in these types of research makes their acquisition in the real-world scenario less approving. We propose an architecture named ResTS (Residual Teacher/Student) that can be used as visualization and a classification technique for diagnosis of the plant disease. ResTS is a tertiary adaptation of formerly suggested Teacher/Student architecture. ResTS is grounded on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) structure that comprises two classifiers (ResTeacher and ResStudent) and a decoder. This architecture trains both the classifiers in a reciprocal mode and the conveyed representation between ResTeacher and ResStudent is used as a proxy to envision the dominant areas in the image for categorization. The experiments have shown that the proposed structure ResTS (F1 score: 0.991) has surpassed the Teacher/Student architecture (F1 score: 0.972) and can yield finer visualizations of symptoms of the disease. Novel ResTS architecture incorporates the residual connections in all the constituents and it executes batch normalization after each convolution operation which is dissimilar to the formerly proposed Teacher/Student architecture for plant disease diagnosis. Residual connections in ResTS help in preserving the gradients and circumvent the problem of vanishing or exploding gradients. In addition, batch normalization after each convolution operation aids in swift convergence and increased reliability. All test results are attained on the PlantVillage dataset comprising 54 306 images of 14 crop species.