A novel groundnut leaf dataset for detection and classification of groundnut leaf diseases

Groundnut (Arachis hypogaea) is a widely cultivated legume crop that plays a vital role in global agriculture and food security. It is a major source of vegetable oil and protein for human consumption, as well as a cash crop for farmers in many regions. Despite the importance of this crop to household food security and income, diseases, particularly Leaf spot (early and late), Alternaria leaf spot, Rust, and Rosette, have had a significant impact on its production. Deep learning (DL) techniques, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have demonstrated significant ability for early diagnosis of the plant leaf diseases. However, the availability of groundnut-specific datasets for training and evaluation of DL models is limited, hindering the development and benchmarking of groundnut-related deep learning applications. Therefore, this study provides a dataset of groundnut leaf images, both diseased and healthy, captured in real cultivation fields at Ramchandrapur, Purba Medinipur, West Bengal, using a smartphone camera. The dataset contains a total of 1720 original images, that can be utilized to train DL models to detect groundnut leaf diseases at an early stage. Additionally, we provide baseline results of applying state-of-the-art CNN architectures on the dataset for groundnut disease classification, demonstrating the potential of the dataset for advancing groundnut-related research using deep learning. The aim of creating this dataset is to facilitate in the creation of sophisticated methods that will aid farmers accurately identify diseases and enhance groundnut yields.