Organizations: Dept. of CSE, Daffodil International University Dhaka, Bangladesh · Dept. of EEE, American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB), Dhaka, Bangladesh · Dept. of Horticulture, Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka, Bangladesh · Dept. of CSE, Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology (AUST), Dhaka, Bangladesh · Dept. of CSE, Uttara University, Dhaka, Bangladesh · Dept. of ECE, North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Early and precise identification of plant diseases, especially in potato crops is important to ensure the health of the crops and ensure the maximum yield . Potato leaf diseases, such as Early Blight and Late Blight, pose significant challenges to farmers, often resulting in yield losses and increased pesticide use. Traditional methods of detection are not only time-consuming, but are also subject to human error, which is why automated and efficient methods are required. The paper introduces a new method of potato leaf disease classification Tiny-ViT model, which is a small and effective Vision Transformer (ViT) developed to be used in resource-limited systems. The model is tested on a dataset of three classes, namely Early Blight, Late Blight, and Healthy leaves, and the preprocessing procedures include resizing, CLAHE, and Gaussian blur to improve the quality of the image. Tiny-ViT model has an impressive test accuracy of 99.85% and a mean CV accuracy of 99.82% which is better than baseline models such as DEIT Small, SWIN Tiny, and MobileViT XS. In addition to this, the model has a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.9990 and narrow confidence intervals (CI) of [0.9980, 0.9995], which indicates high reliability and generalization. The training and testing inference time is competitive, and the model exhibits low computational expenses, thereby, making it applicable in real-time applications. Moreover, interpretability of the model is improved with the help of GRAD-CAM, which identifies diseased areas. Altogether, the proposed Tiny-ViT is a solution with a high level of robustness, efficiency, and explainability to the problem of plant disease classification.
Potato is an important food-security crop in Ethiopia, but its production is affected by foliar diseases, particularly early blight and late blight. This study develops a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify potato leaves into three categories: healthy, early blight, and late blight. The proposed model was trained using 2,215 images from the PlantVillage dataset and evaluated on an independent field dataset containing 247 images collected from potato farms in Banja, Awi Zone, Ethiopia. On PlantVillage, the model achieved 99.04% training accuracy, 98.21% validation accuracy, and 98.66% test accuracy. On the field dataset, it achieved 90.28% accuracy. The study also compares the proposed CNN with VGG16 and MobileNetV2 in terms of classification performance and computational efficiency. The proposed model contains 446,787 trainable parameters, occupies approximately 1.70 MB, and requires an average of 5.58 seconds per training epoch in the reported experimental setup, compared with 9.96 seconds for VGG16 and 7.68 seconds for MobileNetV2. The results demonstrate the potential of a compact CNN for potato leaf disease classification and highlight the importance of independent field evaluation, where image conditions are more variable than in controlled benchmark datasets. The proposed approach may support preliminary disease identification for smallholder farmers in Ethiopia and similar agricultural settings.
This study proposes an overall deep learning architecture for multi-class classification of plant diseases from high-resolution leaf imagery, with a particular interest in investigating the behavior of ResNet-50 and a hybrid ResNet + Vision Transformer (ViT) design. A specially gathered image database with 15,200 training images and 3,800 validation images spanning 38 classes across multiple crops, including tomato, apple, grape etc. were subjected to preprocessing steps such as resizing, normalization, and data augmentation to enhance model robustness. Multiple architectures, including ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNet-B0, were trained and compared with the hybrid ResNet + ViT model. All models were fine-tuned using the AdamW optimizer and cross-entropy loss, with early stopping applied to prevent overfitting and ensure generalization. Furthermore, interpretability techniques such as Grad-CAM and saliency maps were implemented to indicate disease-relevant regions, while segmentation-based analysis was performed to identify the affected parts of a leaf. For every one of the considered architectures, ResNet-50 led to the highest accuracy of 98.74%, whereas the hybrid ResNet + ViT model achieved a competitive accuracy of 98.58%, showing that the hybrid architectures were effective in capturing both local and overall information. The experimental results showcase the promise of transformer-based models to achieve highly accurate, interpretable, and computationally efficient computer-based multi-class multi-disease classification systems, providing helpful assistance for cultivation management practices as well as for precision farming.
Hasibul Islam Sufi, Ridam Roy, Shayla Alam Setu +1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Daffodil International University, Dhaka 1216, Bangladesh
Plant disease detection is still largely manual in Bangladesh, where extension workers eyeball leaf samples across millions of smallholdings. We built AgriMind to automate this: an ensemble of ResNet50, EfficientNet-B0, and DenseNet121 trained on 20,638 PlantVillage images across 15 pepper, potato, and tomato disease classes. Transfer learning with frozen ImageNet backbones and 10 epochs of head-only training keeps the pipeline lightweight. Individual models hit 96--97% on the held-out test set, but averaging their softmax outputs pushes the ensemble to 99.23% -- a two-thirds cut in error rate. We tried biasing the average toward the best validation model; it backfired. Dropping any single model also hurt. Pepper and potato classify perfectly; tomato, with ten visually similar classes, still reaches 99.01%. On an NVIDIA T4 GPU the full ensemble runs at 53 FPS. Whether that translates to real-time mobile use depends on TensorFlow Lite optimization -- work we have not yet completed.