A Deep Learning Methodology for the Early Identification of Chili Plant Diseases Utilizing SSD-ResNet-50 Architecture

Hybrid Deep Learning Architectures for Automated Mango Leaf Disease Detection

India is one of the biggest producers and exporters of mangoes in the world, yet its cultivation is persistently threatened diseases that reduce yield, fruit quality, and orchard longevity. Traditional disease diagnosis is based on agronomists' hand visual inspection, which is a laborious, subjective, and challenging technique to scale across vast plantations. This research provides a hybrid deep learning system that incorporates AlexNet and ResNet-50 for the automated classification of five commercially relevant mango leaf diseases: Bacterial Canker, Anthracnose, Powdery Mildew, Sooty Mould and Healthy foliage. Through a fused, jointly trained classification head, the suggested architecture combines the deep, residual feature hierarchies of ResNet-50 with the shallow, texture-sensitive representations learned by AlexNet, enabling the network to take advantage of complementary visual cues that neither backbone fully captures on its own. The hybrid model was implemented and trained using MATLAB. The trained model achieved a validation accuracy of 99.47%. Comparative analysis against standalone AlexNet, standalone ResNet-50, and other architectures reported in the recent mango plant-disease literature indicates that the hybrid fusion strategy offers a favourable balance of accuracy and convergence stability.

Deep Learning-Based Potato Leaf Disease Detection Using Transfer Learning and Explainable AI Techniques

Objectives: To create a multi-class image classification system to automate the detection of potato crop diseases using deep learning algorithms to classify images of potato leaves. Method: This study involves an implementing and comparing of six deep learning models to classify potato leaves as diseased or infected with pests. The models included a custom CNN as the baseline and five transfer-learning models: VGG16, DenseNet121, MobileNetV2, Xception, and InceptionV3. The final selected model was InceptionV3 due to its ability to extract strong features and achieve superior overall classification performance among all evaluated models. To enhance model’s performance and improve generalization to unseen data, several techniques were implemented, including data augmentation, Batch Normalization, Dropout regularization, and selective fine-tuning of deeper layers. Findings: The proposed model achieved the highest test accuracy (94%) and macro-average F1-score (0.94) compared to other baseline models. The importance of fine-tuning is reflected in the high accuracy of the proposed model. An ablation study found that accuracy dropped to 84.67% without fine-tuning, which demonstrates how critical it is for this model’s domain adaptation. The Grad-CAM analysis showed that the model focuses on biologically relevant areas of the leaves with infection and does not concentrate on backgrounds; therefore, the results indicate the model’s potential for interpretability and deployment in real-world settings. Novelty: This study improves potato leaf disease detection using a fine-tuned InceptionV3 with data augmentation and dropout, while Grad-CAM visualizations enhance model interpretability, reliability, and practical utility for accurate agricultural disease diagnosis. Keywords: PotatoLeaf Disease Detection, Deep Learning, Transfer Learning, InceptionV3, Image Classification, Grad-CAM, Sustainable Agriculture

Deep Learning-Based Intelligent System for Mango Leaf Disease Diagnosis

The infection of mango leaves is a major yield and fruit quality loss problem, and the necessity of having a precise and early diagnostic system for sustainable agriculture. Five convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures–namely, VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50, DenseNet121, and a custom-built AlexNet variant–were evaluated for their performance in classifying eight categories of mango leaf diseases. All models were pre-trained using a well-defined dataset of healthy and infected leaves and fine-tuned using transfer learning. VGG16 had the highest test accuracy of 99%, which was better than ResNet50 (91.5%), DenseNet121 (90.5%), VGG19 (87%), and AlexNet (86.5%). Further evaluation of these models using confusion matrices and F1-scores was conducted to ensure the strength of these models for various diseases including powdery mildew, anthracnose, and bacterial canker. Overall, the results underscore that advanced CNN models—particularly VGG16— can deliver near-expert precision in automated mango leaf disease identification. The leaf disease of mango is a major issue confronting farmers in Southeast Asia, particularly in India. Mango leaf disease is one of the biggest challenges faced by the farmers of south-east Asian countries, especially India.

Plant Leaf Disease Detection using EfficientNetB5 and Transfer Learning

Plant leaf diseases significantly reduce agricultural productivity and crop yield worldwide, making early and accurate detection essential to prevent large-scale crop damage. Traditional disease identification methods rely on manual inspection by experts, which is time-consuming, costly, and often inaccessible to farmers in rural areas. This paper proposes an AI-based leaf disease detection system using deep learning and transfer learning, in which EfficientNetB5 serves as a pretrained feature extractor to classify 38 plant disease categories spanning 14 crop species. Preprocessing includes HSV-based leaf segmentation, resizing to 456×456 pixels, and EfficientNet-specific normalization. A compact two-layer dense classifier is trained on the 2,048-dimensional feature vectors produced by the frozen backbone. The system achieves an overall validation accuracy of 96.49%, macro-average precision of 0.97, recall of 0.96, and F1-score of 0.96 on 2,280 held-out images. Beyond classification, the system provides actionable cure and precautionary recommendations for every detected disease, making it directly useful to smallholder farmers. Comparative analysis with ResNet50, VGG16, and MobileNetV2 confirms that EfficientNetB5 achieves the highest accuracy with a favorable parameter-to-performance ratio. Multi-class ROC evaluation further demonstrates strong discriminative capability across all disease categories.

A Comparative Study of Deep Learning-Based Pest Detection Models with Interpretability and Deployment Strategies for Medicinal Plants

Pest infestations significantly affect the growth, quality, and commercial value of medicinal plants, and early detection is essential for effective crop management. Manual inspection of pest infestation is labor-intensive, subjective, and error-prone. Although deep learning has shown significant performance improvements in plant disease detection, studies on medicinal plants, with an emphasis on interpretability and deployment feasibility, remain limited. This paper presents a comparative analysis of five deep learning models, namely Basic CNN, VGG16, ResNet50, VGG32, and the proposed CFNET, which is based on EfficientNetB3, for binary pest detection in medicinal plants. Experiments were conducted on curated datasets of healthy and infected leaf images. The models were evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and training time. Among all models, the proposed CFNET achieved a peak accuracy of 0.98 and consistently outperformed the baselines across all datasets. To enhance transparency, explainable AI techniques, including Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, LIME, and SHAP, were employed. CFNET produces focused, visually interpretable explanations consistent with known infection patterns. Deployment analysis further confirms CFNET's suitability for mobile and edge-based agricultural monitoring systems.

KashWalNET: Efficient Walnut Disease Recognition Using K-Means-Guided Segmentation and CNN