With the rapid development of intelligent agriculture and precision agriculture, computer image processing technology has been widely used to solve various problems in the agricultural field. In particular, the advantages of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image classification have also been widely used in the automatic recognition and classification of plant diseases. In this paper, a deep convolutional neural network named LeafNet capable of recognizing the seven types of diseases from tea leaf disease images was established, with an accuracy of up to 90.23%, aiming to provide timely and accurate diagnostic services in the remote and topographic tea plantation in China. At the same time, the traditional machine learning algorithm is applied for comparative analysis, which extracts the dense scale-invariant feature transform (DSIFT) of the image and constructs the bag of visual word (BOVW) model to express the image based on the DSIFT descriptor. The support vector machines (SVMs) and multilayer perceptron (MLP) were used to identify tea leaf diseases, with an accuracy of 60.91 and 70.94%, respectively.