A Modified EfficientNetB0-based Deep Learning Model for Accurate Detection and Classification of Groundnut Leaf Diseases

Abstract

Background: Groundnut farming is affected by several leaf diseases that reduce crop yield. Farmers often rely on visual inspection, which can be inaccurate and time-consuming. Early and precise identification of leaf diseases is essential for effective crop management. This study presents a deep learning-based solution to automate disease detection. Methods: A modified EfficientNetB0 architecture is proposed for classifying five types of groundnut leaf conditions: healthy, leaf spot (early and late), alternaria leaf spot, rust and rosette. The dataset is sourced from the Mendeley database that was collected from Ramchandrapur village in West Bengal, India, under natural lighting. A total of 1,720 images were captured using a DSLR camera. After verification and cleaning, the dataset was split into 1,204 training and 516 testing images. All images were resized, normalized and label-encoded. Data augmentation techniques such as rotation, flipping and zoom were used to improve generalization. Regularization was applied to reduce overfitting. The model was trained for 100 epochs using the RMSprop optimizer and early stopping. Result: The model achieved a test accuracy of 99.22%. Evaluation metrics confirm high performance across all classes. The model outperformed existing methods such as ResNet50 (82.3%), CNN with progressive resizing (96.12%) and LeafNet (97.23%). It also maintained low training and validation loss throughout training. These results highlight the model’s robustness, accuracy and potential for real-time field applications. The approach is lightweight and suitable for mobile-based disease detection tools.