Transfer Learning Based Plant Species Classification Using MobileNetV3 and PlantVillage Dataset

• Author(s): Nithya P
• Paper ID: 1716969
• Page: 3570-3576
• Published Date: 01-05-2026
• Published In: Iconic Research And Engineering Journals
• Publisher: IRE Journals
• e-ISSN: 2456-8880
• Volume/Issue: Volume 9 Issue 10 April-2026

Abstract

Identification of plant species is vital for the advancement of various applications ranging from precision agriculture to crop diseases surveillance and biodiversity recording. While the task has historically been accomplished through manual assessment of plant characteristics by botanists or agronomists, this traditional approach poses considerable scalability issues due to reliance on experts’ knowledge and vulnerability to inter-observer variance when dealing with high-volume plant specimen analysis. Over the past decade, however, the use of data-driven techniques has increased substantially, leading to impressive improvements in plant image classification, which can be mainly attributed to convolutional neural networks’ ability to learn distinctive visual features from raw imagery. Motivated by the promising results of recent advancements in this area, the current study presents a plant species classification framework based on transfer learning with MobileNetV3 as the main neural network architecture and PlantVillage dataset as the training data. The chosen model was known for the ability to offer competitive accuracy with significantly reduced computation costs, which made it possible to use the model with low-performance computing resources without compromising results’ quality. To ensure proper functioning of the learning algorithm, the dataset was preprocessed in multiple ways, including resizing images to the necessary dimensions, normalising pixels’ values within the desired numerical range, and assessing classes distribution through visual inspection. Finally, the learning procedure was implemented on Google Colab, where model accuracy and crossentropy loss were calculated on a validation set after every epoch. With an impressive accuracy of 97.87

Keywords

Plant Species Classification, Transfer Learning, MobileNetV3, Convolutional Neural Networks, Deep Learning, PlantVillage Dataset, Image Classification, Precision Agriculture.

Citations

IRE Journals:
Nithya P "Transfer Learning Based Plant Species Classification Using MobileNetV3 and PlantVillage Dataset" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals Volume 9 Issue 10 2026 Page 3570-3576 https://doi.org/10.64388/IREV9I10-1716969

IEEE:
Nithya P "Transfer Learning Based Plant Species Classification Using MobileNetV3 and PlantVillage Dataset" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals, 9(10) https://doi.org/10.64388/IREV9I10-1716969