Detection of Apple Plant Diseases Using Leaf Images through Convolutional Neural Network

Plant diseases have major social, ecological and economic impact on agriculture and frequently results in large financial losses for farmers. Therefore early and precise disease detection is crucial for efficient crop management. The severity of leaf diseases and their direct impact on yield quality have been highlighted in recent studies. Both digital cameras and flatbed scanners can be used to take leaf images but they have certain drawbacks. Although scanners offer a more secure and regulated method of acquiring images they are comparatively slow and may cause edge shadows. This study uses a hybrid deep learning approach to identify diseases in apple plant leaves. To improve classification performance; the proposed approach combines the advantages of Residual Networks (ResNet), Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). CNNs are used to extract features and classify diseases whereas ResNet enhances the learning efficiency of deeper networks. The feature set is optimized using a genetic algorithm which improves accuracy and lowers computational complexity. The model also calculates the percentage of the leaf area that is impacted. According to experimental results the proposed method detects leaf diseases with high accuracy of percentage and low computational cost making it a dependable and effective precision agriculture solution. The proposed model exhibited strong classification efficiency across various leaf conditions that pertaining an accuracy of 0.97 for healthy leaves, 0.994 for apple scab, 0.89 for rust, and 0.91 for powdery mildew.