Corn leaf disease: insightful diagnosis using VGG16 empowered by explainable AI.

The agricultural sector is pivotal to food security and economic stability worldwide. Corn holds particular significance in the global food industry, especially in developing countries where agriculture is a cornerstone of the economy. However, corn crops are vulnerable to various diseases that can significantly reduce yields. Early detection and precise classification of these diseases are crucial to prevent damage and ensure high crop productivity. This study leverages the VGG16 deep learning (DL) model to classify corn leaves into four categories: healthy, blight, gray spot, and common rust. Despite the efficacy of DL models, they often face challenges related to the explainability of their decision-making processes. To address this, Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) is employed to enhance the model's transparency by generating intuitive and human-readable heat maps of input images. The proposed VGG16 model, augmented with LRP, outperformed previous state-of-the-art models in classifying corn leaf diseases. Simulation results demonstrated that the model not only achieved high accuracy but also provided interpretable results, highlighting critical regions in the images used for classification. By generating human-readable explanations, this approach ensures greater transparency and reliability in model performance, aiding farmers in improving their crop yields.

MTDL-EPDCLD: A Multi-Task Deep-Learning-Based System for Enhanced Precision Detection and Diagnosis of Corn Leaf Diseases.

Corn leaf diseases lead to significant losses in agricultural production, posing challenges to global food security. Accurate and timely detection and diagnosis are crucial for implementing effective control measures. In this research, a multi-task deep learning-based system for enhanced precision detection and diagnosis of corn leaf diseases (MTDL-EPDCLD) is proposed to enhance the detection and diagnosis of corn leaf diseases, along with the development of a mobile application utilizing the Qt framework, which is a cross-platform software development framework. The system comprises Task 1 for rapid and accurate health status identification (RAHSI) and Task 2 for fine-grained disease classification with attention (FDCA). A shallow CNN-4 model with a spatial attention mechanism is developed for Task 1, achieving 98.73% accuracy in identifying healthy and diseased corn leaves. For Task 2, a customized MobileNetV3Large-Attention model is designed. It achieves a val_accuracy of 94.44%, and improvements of 4-8% in precision, recall, and F1 score from other mainstream deep learning models. Moreover, the model attains an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.9993, exhibiting an enhancement of 0.002-0.007 compared to other mainstream models. The MTDL-EPDCLD system provides an accurate and efficient tool for corn leaf disease detection and diagnosis, supporting informed decisions on disease management, increased crop yields, and improved food security. This research offers a promising solution for detecting and diagnosing corn leaf diseases, and its continued development and implementation may substantially impact agricultural practices and outcomes.

Improved EfficientNet for corn disease identification.

Introduction: Corn is one of the world's essential crops, and the presence of corn diseases significantly affects both the yield and quality of corn. Accurate identification of corn diseases in real time is crucial to increasing crop yield and improving farmers' income. However, in real-world environments, the complexity of the background, irregularity of the disease region, large intraclass variation, and small interclass variation make it difficult for most convolutional neural network models to achieve disease recognition under such conditions. Additionally, the low accuracy of existing lightweight models forces farmers to compromise between accuracy and real-time. Methods: To address these challenges, we propose FCA-EfficientNet. Building upon EfficientNet, the fully-convolution-based coordinate attention module allows the network to acquire spatial information through convolutional structures. This enhances the network's ability to focus on disease regions while mitigating interference from complex backgrounds. Furthermore, the adaptive fusion module is employed to fuse image information from different scales, reducing interference from the background in disease recognition. Finally, through multiple experiments, we have determined the network structure that achieves optimal performance. Results: Compared to other widely used deep learning models, this proposed model exhibits outstanding performance in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Furthermore, the model has a parameter count of 3.44M and Flops of 339.74M, which is lower than most lightweight network models. We designed and implemented a corn disease recognition application and deployed the model on an Android device with an average recognition speed of 92.88ms, which meets the user's needs. Discussion: Overall, our model can accurately identify corn diseases in realistic environments, contributing to timely and effective disease prevention and control.