Aug 2026· Indian Journal of Science and Technology· 0 citations
TL;DR
This study improves potato leaf disease detection using a fine-tuned InceptionV3 with data augmentation and dropout, while Grad-CAM visualizations enhance model interpretability, reliability, and practical utility for accurate agricultural disease diagnosis.
Abstract
Objectives: To create a multi-class image classification system to automate the detection of potato crop diseases using deep learning algorithms to classify images of potato leaves. Method: This study involves an implementing and comparing of six deep learning models to classify potato leaves as diseased or infected with pests. The models included a custom CNN as the baseline and five transfer-learning models: VGG16, DenseNet121, MobileNetV2, Xception, and InceptionV3. The final selected model was InceptionV3 due to its ability to extract strong features and achieve superior overall classification performance among all evaluated models. To enhance model’s performance and improve generalization to unseen data, several techniques were implemented, including data augmentation, Batch Normalization, Dropout regularization, and selective fine-tuning of deeper layers. Findings: The proposed model achieved the highest test accuracy (94%) and macro-average F1-score (0.94) compared to other baseline models. The importance of fine-tuning is reflected in the high accuracy of the proposed model. An ablation study found that accuracy dropped to 84.67% without fine-tuning, which demonstrates how critical it is for this model’s domain adaptation. The Grad-CAM analysis showed that the model focuses on biologically relevant areas of the leaves with infection and does not concentrate on backgrounds; therefore, the results indicate the model’s potential for interpretability and deployment in real-world settings. Novelty: This study improves potato leaf disease detection using a fine-tuned InceptionV3 with data augmentation and dropout, while Grad-CAM visualizations enhance model interpretability, reliability, and practical utility for accurate agricultural disease diagnosis.
Keywords: PotatoLeaf Disease Detection, Deep Learning, Transfer Learning, InceptionV3, Image Classification, Grad-CAM, Sustainable Agriculture
Background: Groundnut is a vital crop affected by several foliar diseases, such as leaf spot, alternaria, rust and rosette. These diseases can reduce crop quality and yield. Manual identification is time-consuming and may lack accuracy. Deep learning methods offer a reliable alternative for automated disease detection. Methods: This study proposes a fine-tuned InceptionV3 convolutional neural network to classify five groundnut leaf classes. A dataset (Sourced from the Mendeley database) of 1,720 high-resolution images was used. These were collected under natural conditions from fields in Ramchandrapur village, West Bengal, India. Images were resized, normalized and augmented to improve model generalization. Transfer learning was applied using the InceptionV3 base model. A custom classification head was added with dense layers, batch normalization, dropout and L2 regularization. The model was trained with the RMSprop optimizer and evaluated using performance matrices, area under the curve (AUC) and Cohen’s Kappa. Result: The proposed model achieved a test accuracy of 98.26%. The macro average F1-score was 0.9872 and cohen’s kappa reached 0.9762. AUC values were above 0.998 for all classes. The model showed excellent performance, especially for minority classes like rosette and rust. It correctly classified almost all samples, with very few misclassifications. Compared to earlier studies, the model performed competitively and offered high interpretability and efficiency. These results support its use in real-world disease diagnosis in agriculture.
Zhe Li, Xue-Lu Qiu· Legume Research An Internati...· 0 citations
A modified AlexNet architecture for classifying field-captured tomato leaf images into seven disease categories was developed and generally focused on symptom-bearing leaf regions, whereas target spot was the most difficult category to classify.
Debabrat Bharali, Kanak C. Bora, Rashel Sarkar et al.· Journal of Scientific Resear...· 0 citations
The findings indicate that the combination of ResNet50 and Grad-CAM is effective for plant disease classification and provides better explainability for deep learning-based agricultural applications.
W. Zalmi, Rahmi Putri Kurnia, Dyah Listianing Tyas· Informatik : Jurnal Ilmu Kom...· 0 citations
Background: Faba bean is an important legume crop valued for its nutritional and soil-enriching benefits, yet its productivity is severely affected by foliar diseases. Automated image-based detection using deep learning provides a rapid and reliable approach for early disease identification and improved crop management. Methods: This study developed a machine learning-based automated framework for multi-class classification of Faba bean leaf diseases using transfer learning with the VGG16 convolutional neural network. A dataset of 8,021 RGB images collected under natural field conditions was used, comprising four classes: healthy, rust, gall and chocolate spot. Images were resized to 224 × 224 pixels and normalized prior to training. The pretrained convolutional layers of VGG16 were frozen and a custom classification head with global average pooling and dropout regularization was added. Model performance was evaluated using classification metrics. Result: The proposed model achieved an overall classification accuracy of 92.34% and a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.9227 on the test dataset. Strong classification performance was observed across all disease categories, with particularly high predictive accuracy for healthy and rust classes. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of transfer learning for plant disease detection and highlight its potential for scalable, automated crop health monitoring in precision agriculture.
Hsin-Yin Hsieh, Meng-Dar Shieh· Legume Research An Internati...· 0 citations
Background: Accurate and timely diagnosis of foliar diseases is the most crucial factor in efforts to maximize crop yield and ensure sustainability. Existing deep learning models, especially single-backbone CNNs, have achieved promising results; however, they often fail to generalize well in different orchard conditions. Methods: In this study, the AFS-PLDCNet framework has been proposed for robust leaf disease classification. This framework uses an attention-based feature-fusion approach to combine deep representations extracted from EfficientNetV2S, MobileNetV2 and ResNet18. A learnable attention mechanism assigns adaptive weights dynamically to each feature and a lightweight meta-learner is used for classification. A new dataset of 9000 apple leaf images was captured in Himachal Pradesh’s orchards, encompassing Alternaria leaf blotch, Marssonina blotch and healthy leaves. Result: The experimental results demonstrate that AFS-PLDCNet achieved superior classification accuracy compared to existing single-backbone CNNs. The proposed model is well-suited for real-time, field-level leaf disease classification and precision agriculture systems.
Neha Sawant, K. L. Bansal· Indian Journal of Agricultur...· 0 citations
The study demonstrates that transfer learning effectively enhances plant disease classification, enabling faster, more reliable and resource efficient detection for precision agriculture.
Chika K. Gangadharan, P. M. Jasmine, Roshni Alex et al.· Indian Journal of Agricultur...· 0 citations
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