A Channel Attention-Driven Optimized CNN for Efficient Early Detection of Plant Diseases in Resource Constrained Environment

Sana Parez, Naqqash Dilshad and Jong Weon Lee ()
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Sana Parez: Department of Software, Sejong University, Seoul 05006, Republic of Korea
Naqqash Dilshad: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sejong University, Seoul 05006, Republic of Korea
Jong Weon Lee: Department of Software, Sejong University, Seoul 05006, Republic of Korea

Agriculture, 2025, vol. 15, issue 2, 1-17

Abstract: Agriculture is a cornerstone of economic prosperity, but plant diseases can severely impact crop yield and quality. Identifying these diseases accurately is often difficult due to limited expert availability and ambiguous information. Early detection and automated diagnosis systems are crucial to mitigate these challenges. To address this, we propose a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) designed for resource-constrained devices termed as LeafNet . LeafNet draws inspiration from the block-wise VGG19 architecture but incorporates several optimizations, including a reduced number of parameters, smaller input size, and faster inference time while maintaining competitive accuracy. The proposed LeafNet leverages small, uniform convolutional filters to capture fine-grained details of plant disease features, with an increasing number of channels to enhance feature extraction. Additionally, it integrates channel attention mechanisms to prioritize disease-related features effectively. We evaluated the proposed method on four datasets: the benchmark plant village (PV), the data repository of leaf images (DRLIs), the newly curated plant composite (PC) dataset, and the BARI Sunflower (BARI-Sun) dataset, which includes diverse and challenging real-world images. The results show that the proposed performs comparably to state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, false positive rate (FPR), model size, and runtime, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

Keywords: plant disease classification; smart agriculture; precision farming; attention mechanism; VGG19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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