ADVANCING PLANT DISEASE DETECTION THROUGH STATE-OF-THE-ART DEEP LEARNING MODELS LEVER-AGING EFFICIENTNETV2, VISION TRANSFORMER, AND ENSEMBLE TECHNIQUES
Plant diseases are still posing a challenge to the productivity, quality of crops, and food security, especially in locations where field diagnosis is based on manual visual inspec-tion. This paper assesses deep learning network-based automated classification of plant leaf diseases on public RGB leaf-image datasets, such as the Kaggle New Plant Diseases Dataset (Augmented) and PlantVillage images. They investigated four archi-tectures: EfficientNetV2B0, ResNet152V2, DenseNet201, and one hybrid Vision Trans-former (ViT)-based model. The steps of the experiment involved loading the dataset, exploratory analysis, preprocessing, resizing, normalizing, augmentation, transfer learning, independent model training, and evaluation metrics such as accuracy, preci-sion, recall, F1-score, training curves, testing results, and confusion matrices. The hy-brid ViT-based model was reported to have the best accuracy of 99.5%. On the smaller seven class subset of PlantVillage, EfficientNetV2B0 scored 98.11%. On the 38-class dataset, DenseNet201 improved test accuracy (97.34) and validation classification ac-curacy (around 98). ResNet152V2 scored 97.01 on the 38-class test set. The results demonstrate that CNN and transformer-based models can help to recognize plant diseases accurately whereas hybrid attention-based structures provide a promising path to enhance fine-grained classification. Since the model notebooks had varying class settings and splits, the comparison is seen as a model-structured assessment as opposed to a precisely identical benchmark across all architectures.