Deep learning-based automated disease detection and classification model for precision agriculture

Plant phenotyping and Precision agriculture are information- and technology-oriented fields with specific challenges and demands for the detection and diagnosis of plant disease. Precision agriculture can be referred as a crop management method related to the spatial and temporal variability in soil and crop factors within a field. Accurate and early diagnosis and detection of plant diseases were major factors in plant production and the reduction in quantitative and qualitative losses in crop yield. Advancement of automatic disease detection and classification system is significantly explored in precision agriculture. In recent times, research workers have investigated numerous cultures leveraging dissimilar parts of a plant. This article develops a new Deep Learning-based Automated Plant Disease Detection and Classification (DL-APDDC) Model for Precision Agriculture. The presented DL-APDDC algorithm concentrates on the recognition and classification of plant diseases in leaf and fruit regions. In the initial stage, the leaf and fruit regions are extracted by the use of U2Net-based background removal. Next, the Adam optimizer with SqueezeNet model is exploited as feature extractor, and the hyperparameters are tuned by Adam optimizer. Finally, the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) classifier performs classification of plant diseases. The experimental validation of the DL-APDDC technique is tested on benchmark plant disease dataset. The simulation values indicated the enhanced outcomes of the DL-APDDC approach over other models.