Cotton leaf diseases present a major threat to global cotton production, significantly impacting both yield and fiber quality. Traditional diagnostic methods are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and demand highly skilled professionals, making them inefficient for large-scale agricultural applications. Although earlier deep learning –based approaches have shown promising results in identifying cotton leaf diseases such as Bacterial Blight, Fusarium Wilt, and Curl Virus Disease, their performance is often limited by complex preprocessing requirements and insufficient generalization to real-world field conditions. To address these challenges, this study proposes and optimized transfer learning-based model, CLDP-CNN, designed to enhance feature extraction and classification efficiency using pre-trained deep neural networks. This study demonstrates the development of Cotton Leaf Disease Prediction Convolutional Neural Network (CLDP-CNN) automatically, utilizing Transfer Learning (TL) which operates on meticulously prepared datasets. Two distinct datasets were used to train the model: the first consisted of field images from cotton farms, while the second was sourced from Kaggle. The main goal of this research examines how the model performs on real-world field datasets. The CLDP-CNN model has proven highly accurate by attaining 99.78% detection success rates for cotton leaf diseases when processing primary dataset which surpasses its secondary dataset accuracy rate of 99.62%. Both the primary dataset and secondary dataset resulted in high accuracy values for the VGG16 pre-trained model which achieved 99.56% accuracy on the primary dataset and 98.82% on the secondary dataset. A web-based application enhances the capabilities of the CLDP-CNN model by providing real-time updates on the health status of cotton plants. This technology empowers farmers with valuable information, enabling them to take timely protective actions to prevent potential severe yield losses in their cotton crops.
Naeem et al. (Sun,) studied this question.