An automatic classification framework for identifying type of plant leaf diseases using multi-scale feature fusion-based adaptive deep network

This method of identifying plant leaf disease generally involves a large team of experts with extensive knowledge of plant diseases, and it can be expensive, time-consuming, and subjective. Hence, a novel plant leaf disease classification framework is proposed to classify the plant diseases and then take preventive measures based on the classified outcomes. The plant leaf images are collected from traditional databases. The classification of leaf diseases is done with the support of the developed Multi-scale Feature Fusion-based Adaptive Deep Network (MFF-ADNet). In this developed MFF-ADNet, two processes are carried out such as feature extraction and classification. The collected images are given to the feature extraction phase, where the Visual Geometry Group (16) (VGG16), Variational Autoencoder (VAE), and Visual Transformer (ViT) network are used for extracting the features. The extracted features are fused and the resultant Multi-scale fused features are provided to the input of the classification process. Here, the Adaptive Convolutional Neural Network with Attention Mechanism (CNNAM) is utilized for classifying the plant leaf diseases and the parameters are optimized using the Enhanced Gannet Optimization Algorithm (EGOA) approach. From the results, the median value is obtained for a proposed method that is more than 7.18% of MAO-MFF-ADNet, 4.11% of TSO-MFF-ADNet, 8.03% of CO-MFF-ADNet and 4.07% of GOA-MFF-ADNet. Therefore, the experimental outcome of the developed plant leaf classification model is validated over various approaches to ensure the goodness of the developed scheme.