Multi-Plant Disease Classification using ResNet50-based Deep Ensemble Learning Framework

Abstract

Agricultural productivity and food security are heavily impacted by plant diseases, and thus there is a high demand for accurate and automated plant disease detection that can be achieved by applying deep learning techniques. This research proposes a Multi-Model Ensemble Method Based on Deep Learning for multi-plant disease detection using ResNet50 to improve classification performance across multiple crop varieties. The proposed framework takes five important categories of plants into consideration including tomato, potato, grape, apple and maize, and 10 classes of healthy and diseased plants are generated from the PlantSeg dataset. The Anaconda platform was used along with Python to create a development environment that allows data preprocessing, augmentation, training and testing to be implemented efficiently. The proposed ensemble framework combines the feature extraction power of ResNet50 with several deep learning classifiers so as to obtain a good identification performance at different resolutions and environments. The proposed model performance is tested with the following metrics Accuracy, Precision, Inference Time, and Resolution quality and compared with MobileNetV2, YOLOv8 and the baseline CNN models. Experimental results show that the proposed ensemble ResNet50 framework achieves an accuracy of 98.7% and precision of 98.3%, which is about 6.4%, 4.8%, and 9.2% higher than that of MobileNetV2, YOLOv8, and CNN respectively. Moreover, the proposed method achieves high resolution disease localization capability with an inference time improvement of almost 18% compared with YOLOv8. The proposed system greatly improves the detection accuracy of the early stage and the calculation speed of the system, which is very suitable for smart agriculture applications and real-time monitoring of the health status of crops.