A new hybrid approach for grapevine leaves recognition based on ESRGAN data augmentation and GASVM feature selection

Grapevine leaf is a commodity that is collected only once a year and has a high return on investment due to its export. However, only certain types of grapevine leaves are consumed. Therefore, it is extremely important to distinguish the types of grapevine leaves. In particular, performing this process automatically on industrial machines will reduce human errors, workload, and thus cost. In this study, a new hybrid approach based on a convolutional neural network is proposed that can automatically distinguish the types of grapevine leaves. In the proposed approach, firstly, the overfitting of network models is prevented by applying data augmentation techniques. Second, new synthetic images were created with the ESRGAN technique to obtain detailed texture information. Third, the top blocks of the MobileNetV2 and VGG19 CNN models were replaced with the newly designed top block, effectively extracting features with the data. Fourthly, the GASVM algorithm was adapted and used to create a subset of the features to eliminate the ineffective and unimportant ones from the obtained features. Finally, SVM classification was performed with the feature subset consisting of 314 features, and approximately 2% higher accuracy and MCC score were obtained compared to the approaches in the literature.