A Convolutional Neural Network for Accurate Cotton Leaf Disease Classification

Abstract

Cotton leaf diseases significantly affect crop productivity, fiber quality, and agricultural sustainability, making early and accurate disease diagnosis essential for effective crop management. Manual disease identification is time-consuming, subjective, and dependent on expert knowledge, highlighting the need for automated and intelligent diagnostic systems. This study proposes a CNN-based deep learning framework for automated multiclass classification of cotton leaf diseases using digital image analysis. The proposed framework is trained on a curated dataset comprising healthy and diseased cotton leaf images representing multiple disease categories. CNN architecture performs hierarchical feature extraction, automatically learning discriminative spatial representations from input images without manual feature engineering. The network is trained for 100 epochs using optimized hyperparameters to achieve robust feature learning while ensuring high generalization capability. Model performance is quantitatively evaluated using standard classification metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and confusion matrix analysis, providing a comprehensive assessment of classification effectiveness. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves reliable disease recognition with high classification accuracy and minimal inter-class confusion, validating the effectiveness of CNN-based feature learning for agricultural image analysis. The automated system enables rapid and accurate disease diagnosis, supporting timely intervention, optimized crop protection strategies, and improved decision-making in precision agriculture. Future work will focus on improving model robustness through the integration of larger and more diverse datasets, advanced data augmentation techniques, transfer learning, and hybrid deep learning architectures. Furthermore, deployment of the proposed framework on mobile, edge, and web-based platforms, together with IoT technologies, can facilitate real-time field monitoring and disease surveillance. Overall, the proposed CNN framework provides a scalable, computationally efficient, and intelligent solution for automated cotton leaf disease classification, contributing to the advancement of AI-driven precision agriculture and sustainable crop management.