RNDDNet: A residual nested dilated DenseNet based deep-learning model for chilli plant disease classification

The most significant peril to food safety arises from plant diseases, capable of substantially diminishing both the quantity and quality of agricultural yields. Identifying these plant diseases stands out as the foremost challenge within the agricultural sector. Convolutional and deep neural networks prove effective in resolving image classification challenges within the realm of computer vision. Numerous Deep Neural Network(DNN)-based structures have been employed to diagnose plant diseases. Many DNN models in the field make use of various iterations of Dense and DenseNet layers in order to enhance the receptive field and capture intricate features within the data. However, it is important to note that such models often come with a significant computational burden and can introduce aliasing artifacts due to their complexity and resource-intensive nature. To overcome those limitations, we proposed a novel Residual Nested Dilated DenseNet based deep-learning (RNDDNet) model in this paper. Residual Nested Dilated DenseNet model residual connections are achieving the required receptive field, and their dilation factors are effective in extracting more features. The RNDDNet model exhibits the highest level of accuracy in identifying plant diseases. This research introduces a less computational cost and compact model to detect diseases in plant leaves. The proposed model functions to identify diseases, utilizing a dataset comprising 3,800 photographs of chilli leaves, categorized into six distinct classes: five disorder classes and one healthy chilli class. Through experimentation, the outcomes indicate that the suggested model achieves an accuracy of 98.09 %, along with a precision of 97 %, a recall of 97.25 %, and an F1 score of 97.25%. The presented approach demonstrates its superiority over existing methodologies.