IAES International Journal of Artificial Intelligence (IJ-AI)
Vol 15, No 3: June 2026

Tomato leaf disease classification using DenseNet-121 with data augmentation and fine-tuning

Sufajar Butsianto (Pelita Bangsa University)
Anggi Muhammad Rifa’i (Pelita Bangsa University)



Article Info

Publish Date
01 Jun 2026

Abstract

In recent years, accurate classification of agricultural images has become increasingly important to support precision farming and crop disease monitoring. However, achieving reliable performance remains challenging due to visual similarity between disease classes and dataset variability. This study presents an applied evaluation of DenseNet-121 combined with data augmentation and fine-tuning for multi-class tomato leaf disease classification. Experiments were conducted using a publicly available tomato leaf image dataset consisting of 5,000 images across 10 classes. All images were resized to 64×64 pixels and split into 80% training and 20% testing sets using a stratified strategy. Data augmentation was applied exclusively to the training data to improve generalization. The experimental results show a progressive performance improvement across training stages, achieving a final classification accuracy of 98.44% with a loss of 4.72% after fine-tuning. Per-class evaluation indicates strong performance across most disease categories, with minor confusion observed among visually similar classes. While the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed training strategy under controlled experimental conditions, further validation using real-field images is required. Overall, this study shows the potential of DenseNet-121 with transfer learning to support tomato leaf disease classification in precision agriculture applications.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

IJAI

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Engineering

Description

IAES International Journal of Artificial Intelligence (IJ-AI) publishes articles in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The scope covers all artificial intelligence area and its application in the following topics: neural networks; fuzzy logic; simulated biological evolution algorithms (like ...