Rising temperatures and changing weather conditions are accelerating the spread of plant diseases and increasing the threat to global food security. Reliable detection of leaf diseases is therefore essential to protect crop yields and ensure food quality. Deep learning has proven to be a powerful tool for classifying leaf diseases across various crops. Due to the natural variability of plants, plant diseases often appear in irregular structures. Surface unevenness, folds, or dirt particles are common in field images and can be mistakenly identified as important features by convolutional neural networks (CNNs). This is a challenge that has not been sufficiently addressed in previous studies. This study proposes a novel deep learning approach that takes into account both the specific visual characteristics of plant diseases and potential disturbances in the microstructure, such as surface irregularities or prominent leaf veins, which may mislead the model. Using stratified five-fold cross-validation on a peer-reviewed dataset, which comprises 2,801 images of radish leaves across five classes (healthy, three disease classes: mosaic virus, black leaf spot, and downy mildew, and one pest-affected class: flea beetle), the proposed method achieved an average and balanced accuracy of 99.86%, establishing a new dataset-level benchmark in the field and demonstrating its effectiveness. The results indicate that the proposed approach may provide a promising basis for future applications in agricultural field monitoring, automated sorting and post-harvest quality control, offering potential to reduce both food waste and associated costs.
Plant diseases have long been considered a major threat to global food production systems. Therefore, early diagnosis is vital to mitigate the risk of these diseases. This task can be challenging, as the number of harmful diseases is substantial. One technology that has gained widespread interest is artificial intelligence, specifically deep learning, which is used to identify plant diseases using leaf patterns. This paper presents two deep learning models, a custom CNN model and a transfer learning model based on the DenseNet-121 architecture. Experiments were carried out using the PlantCity dataset, which consists of twelve subsets of diverse crop species representing fruits, vegetables, and grains with variations among the subsets, including the number of classes, the subset sizes, class distribution, and visual complexity of disease symptoms. The two models were evaluated using multiple metrics, including accuracy, loss, precision, recall, and F1-score. Explainable AI using the LIME technique was deployed to better interpret the acquired results. Results showed that the developed transfer learning model based on DenseNet-121 had superior performance over the CNN model, with accuracies ranging from 86% to 99% across eleven experimented crops. In order to perform an independent experimental validation for the developed model, future work will focus on constructing a local crop dataset captured from Iraqi fields to evaluate the developed models based on the local environment.
H. Jeiad, S. Samaan, Omar Janeh et al.· Automation· 0 citations
—The existence of plant leaf diseases is a big problem for farmers all over the world because they make crops less healthy and less plentiful, which puts global food security at risk. The most common problems with diagnosing plant leaf diseases are a lack of experience, different ways of undertaking visual assessments, and image overlaps, all of which can lead to wrong diagnoses. This study introduces a hybrid deep learning architecture that integrates squeeze-and-excitation residual blocks, capsule networks, bidirectional long short-term memory, and attention mechanisms. The design utilizes convolutional operators for effective feature extraction, Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) block for channel reweighting, capsule networks for spatial relationship capture Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) for sequential dependencies, and attention mechanisms for emphasizing prominent features. Experiments were performed on 2 empirical datasets: the Corn Leaf Disease Dataset (CLDD) and the Rice Leaf Disease Dataset (RLDD). The data were divided into 60% for training, 20% for validation, and 20% for testing. The proposed method attained 99.88% training accuracy on CLDD and 100% on RLDD. During testing, the class-wise accuracies were 99.29% for blight and 100% for the other CLDD categories. In the case of RLDD, the accuracies attained were 78.95% for bacterial leaf blight, 85.53% for brown spot, 89.77% for healthy samples, 77.27% for leaf blast, 100% for leaf scald, and 97.73% for narrow brown spot. This work highlights practical potential for deployment in terms of mobile applications, enabling farmers to obtain rapid, reliable, and cost-effective field diagnoses, thereby improving agricultural productivity and sustainability.
Aekkarat Suksukont, Ekachai Naowanich· Journal of Advances in Infor...· 0 citations
Agriculture plays a pivotal role in ensuring global food security, economic stability, and sustainable development. Plant diseases significantly reduce agricultural productivity, resulting in substantial economic losses and threatening food supply worldwide. Early and accurate identification of plant leaf diseases enables timely intervention, minimizes crop damage, and enhances agricultural yield. Traditional disease diagnosis relies heavily on visual inspection by agricultural experts, making the process labor-intensive, subjective, and unsuitable for large-scale deployment. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning, have transformed plant disease diagnosis by enabling automatic feature extraction and highly accurate image-based classification.
This review presents a comprehensive analysis of recent developments in deep learning techniques for plant leaf disease identification. Various convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, including AlexNet, VGGNet, ResNet, DenseNet, EfficientNet, MobileNet, Inception, and Xception, are critically reviewed along with modern transformer-based models such as Vision Transformer (ViT), Swin Transformer, and hybrid CNN–Transformer frameworks. The paper also examines transfer learning strategies, object detection methods including YOLO and Faster R-CNN, and semantic segmentation approaches such as U-Net and DeepLabV3+.
Publicly available benchmark datasets, including PlantVillage, PlantDoc, AI Challenger, Cassava Leaf Disease, and Rice Leaf Disease datasets, are discussed in terms of dataset diversity, annotation quality, and practical applicability. Furthermore, image preprocessing techniques, data augmentation methods, evaluation metrics, and deployment considerations for mobile and edge devices are comprehensively reviewed.
The paper identifies current research challenges, including dataset imbalance, environmental variability, model interpretability, computational complexity, and limited real-world generalization. Finally, emerging research directions such as explainable artificial intelligence, federated learning, multimodal learning, self-supervised learning, lightweight architectures, and edge AI are discussed to provide future research opportunities.
This review serves as a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, and agricultural technologists interested in developing robust, scalable, and intelligent plant disease identification systems.
Allupati Chakradhar Patro· International Journal of Sci...· 0 citations
An extensive set of experiments was conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed model for plant disease detection, and it is demonstrated that the model achieves highly reliable results, with an accuracy of 97.13%.
Hayat Meddeber, M. Meddeber· ITEGAM- Journal of Engineeri...· 0 citations
Plant diseases remain a threat to global agricultural productivity, food security and livelihoods,
especially in developing countries where the availability of experts in agriculture is still limited.
The recent progress in AI, particularly deep learning and computer vision, has ushered in new
possibilities for automated plant disease diagnosis, especially for plant image-based systems. This
paper provides a systematic review of the deep learning methods employed for plant disease
diagnosis, highlighting CNN-based methods, the application of transfer learning, explainable AI
(XAI) methods and deployment issues. In the framework of PRISMA 2020, the relevant peer
reviewed literature from 2016 to 2025 was systematically identified, screened and analysed on the
most important academic databases. The review compared some of the most popular architectures
such as GoogLeNet, DenseNet-121, MobileNetV2, EfficientNet, Attention-CNNs and Vision
Transformers. Results showed very high classification accuracy in controlled lab conditions with
DenseNet-121 achieving ~99.75% accuracy with good computational efficiency. But it also
revealed a big gap between the lab and the field, mainly due to environmental variations, domain
shifts, and dependence on datasets. Some innovative and emerging technologies like explainable
AI, hyperspectral imaging, few-shot learning, and lightweight mobile architectures showed
promise of enhancing the interpretability, early detection of disease, and the use of smart phones
in low-resource agricultural settings. In conclusion, the study suggests that in order to be
implementable in the field, future intelligent agricultural diagnosis systems must be able to
balance predictive accuracy, explainability, computational efficiency and field adaptability. The
results enrich the existing knowledge on precision agriculture and serve as useful information for
researchers, agricultural technologists, and policymakers working on the creation of AI-based
systems for crop protection.
Usman Haruna· Research Journal of Pure Sci...· 0 citations
Plant diseases threaten global agriculture, causing 20–40% yield losses and food insecurity. Current diagnostic methods are costly and lack scalability. While deep learning advances plant disease detection, there remains a need for CNNs with simpler architectures, better generalizability, and lower computational cost. This study presents a novel CNN for multi-class classification of 38 diseases. Trained on a public dataset of over 87,000 RGB images, the architecture comprises five convolutional blocks (filters 32–512) with max pooling and dropout (0.25, 0.4), followed by a 1,500-unit dense layer and SoftMax output. Optimized with Adam (lr=0.0001) and categorical cross-entropy, the model achieved 98% training and 96% validation accuracy with approximately 28.7 million parameters significantly fewer than transfer learning architectures. These results demonstrate an effective balance between predictive performance and computational efficiency, positioning the model as a promising tool for real-world agricultural deployment.