
Automatic grape leaf diseases identification via
UnitedModel based on multiple convolutional
neural networks
Miaomiao Ji
a
, Lei Zhang
b
, Qiufeng Wu
c,
*
a
College of Engineering, Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin 150030, China
b
School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh 15260, USA
c
College of Science, Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin 150030, China
ARTICLE INFO
Article history:
Received 17 April 2019
Received in revised form
11 October 2019
Accepted 15 October 2019
Available online xxxx
Keywords:
Grape leaf diseases
Identification
Multi-network integration method
Convolutional neural network
Deep learning
ABSTRACT
Grape diseases are main factors causing serious grapes reduction. So it is urgent to develop
an automatic identification method for grape leaf diseases. Deep learning techniques have
recently achieved impressive successes in various computer vision problems, which
inspires us to apply them to grape diseases identification task. In this paper, a united con-
volutional neural networks (CNNs) architecture based on an integrated method is pro-
posed. The proposed CNNs architecture, i.e., UnitedModel is designed to distinguish
leaves with common grape diseases i.e., black rot, esca and isariopsis leaf spot from
healthy leaves. The combination of multiple CNNs enables the proposed UnitedModel to
extract complementary discriminative features. Thus the representative ability of United-
Model has been enhanced. The UnitedModel has been evaluated on the hold-out PlantVil-
lage dataset and has been compared with several state-of-the-art CNN models. The
experimental results have shown that UnitedModel achieves the best performance on var-
ious evaluation metrics. The UnitedModel achieves an average validation accuracy of
99.17% and a test accuracy of 98.57%, which can serve as a decision support tool to help
farmers identify grape diseases.
Ó 2019 China Agricultural University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of
KeAi. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
1. Introduction
Grapes, as one of the most commonly cultivated economical
fruit crops throughout the world, are widely used in the pro-
duction of wine, brandy or nonfermented drinks and are
eaten fresh or dried as raisins [1]. However, grapes are vulner-
able to various different types of diseases, such as black rot,
esca, isariopsis leaf spot, etc. It is estimated that losses
caused by grape diseases in Georgia, USA in 2015 were
approximately $1.62 million. Around $0.5 million was spent
on diseases control and the rest was the loss caused by the
diseases [2]. Thus, early detection of grape diseases can
potentially cut losses and control costs and consequently
can improve the quality of products.
For decades, the diseases identification is mostly per-
formed by human. The process of recognition and diagnosis
is subjective, error-prone, costly and time-consuming. In
addition, new diseases can occur in places where they were
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inpa.2019.10.003
2214-3173 Ó 2019 China Agricultural University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: qfwu@neau.edu.cn (Q. Wu).
Peer review under responsibility of China Agricultural University.
Available at www.sciencedirect.com
INFORMATION PROCESSING IN AGRICULTURE xxx (xxxx) xxx
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/inpa
Please cite this article as: M. Ji, L. Zhang and Q. Wu, Automatic grape leaf diseases identification via UnitedModel based on multiple convolu-
tional neural networks, Information Processing in Agriculture, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inpa.2019.10.003