Enhanced Plant Disease Classification Using Deep Learning: An Attention-Guided Transfer Learning Approach
Keywords:
Attention mechanism, Convolutional neural networks, Deep learning, Efficient Net, Grad-CAM, Plant disease classification, Precision agriculture, Transfer learningAbstract
Timely and accurate identification of crop diseases from leaf images remains one of the more stubborn problems in precision agriculture, largely because the visual differences between many diseases are subtle and the imaging conditions in the field are anything but controlled. This paper presents an enhanced deep learning framework for plant leaf disease classification that couples a lightweight EfficientNet-B0 backbone with a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and a carefully tuned training pipeline. The attention module lets the network concentrate on lesion-bearing regions of the leaf rather than spreading its capacity across the whole image, while the training pipeline — combining transfer learning, an aggressive-but-realistic augmentation strategy, label smoothing, and mixup regularisation — pushes generalisation without inflating the parameter budget. Evaluation of the model is performed on the PlantVillage dataset (54,305 images across 38 disease-and-crop categories spanning 14 species), with benchmarking against six widely used convolutional architectures: VGG16, InceptionV3, ResNet50, MobileNetV2, DenseNet121, and a plain EfficientNet-B0. The proposed model reaches a test accuracy of 99.56% with a macro-averaged F1-score of 99.54%, outperforming every baseline while keeping the parameter count at roughly 5.4 million — an order of magnitude smaller than VGG16. An ablation study isolates the contribution of each component, and Grad-CAM visualisations confirm that the attention-augmented network attends to the diseased tissue rather than the background. A deliberately unflattering cross-dataset evaluation on field-condition images is also presented, where accuracy decreases to 71.8%, highlighting the challenges and implications for real-world deployment. The results suggest that modest architectural additions, applied thoughtfully, can deliver a favourable accuracy-to-cost trade-off suitable for mobile and edge diagnosis.
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