Efficient Faba Bean Leaf Disease Identification through Smart Detection using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Background: Legumes, such as lentils, field peas, Faba beans and chickpeas, are high in vitamins, fiber, important minerals and protein and can help avoid obesity and cardiovascular illnesses. They also contribute to ecosystem services, such as nitrogen fixation and resilience to environmental stresses. Despite a 60% increase in global pulse production from 2000 to 2021, a demand-supply gap, especially in South Asia, raises concerns about nutritional access. Since illnesses are currently an issue to the food security of faba beans, machine learning is required for efficient disease identification. Methods: This research employs Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for robust Faba bean leaf disease identification. The CNN model is trained with diverse images representing specific diseases. The study focuses on diseases like Chocolate Spot, Faba Bean Gall, Rust and Healthy leaves. Image processing involves resizing, grayscale conversion and labeling. The CNN architecture includes eight convolutional layers, four max-pooling layers and three dropout layers. The model is trained using 80% of the dataset, validated using 20% and tested for accuracy. Result: The CNN model achieves an accuracy of 99.37% during training and 89.69% during validation after 75 epochs. Confusion matrix and classification report illustrate the model's performance. It shows high precision, recall and F1 scores for each class, indicating balanced performance. Chocolate Spot and Rust exhibit the highest precision and F1 scores. The overall accuracy is 91%, comparable to other studies on Faba bean disease detection. The study presents a CNN-based disease identification system for Faba beans, demonstrating high accuracy and balanced performance across different diseases. The model's effectiveness is comparable to other advanced techniques. The research highlights the potential of machine learning in optimizing disease management for Faba beans. Future work could explore a broader range of diseases and incorporate hybrid machine learning algorithms for further improvement.