AI-driven plant disease detection with tailored convolutional neural network

In recent times, deep learning has been widely used in agriculture fields to identify diseases in crops, weather prediction, and crop yield prediction. However, designing efficient deep learning models that are lightweight, cost-effective, and suitable for deployment on small devices remains a challenge. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture optimized using a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to automate the selection of critical hyperparameters, such as the number and size of filters, ensuring high performance with minimal computational overhead. In this work, we have built our own tea leaf disease dataset consisting of three different tea leaf diseases, two diseases caused by pests, and one due to pathogens (infectious organisms) and environmental conditions. The proposed genetic algorithm-based CNN achieved an accuracy rate of 97.6% on the tea leaf disease dataset. To further validate its robustness, the model was tested on two additional datasets, namely PlantVillage and Rice leaf disease dataset, achieving accuracies of 96.99% and 99%, respectively. Performances of the proposed model are also compared with several state-of-the-art deep learning models, and the results show that the proposed model outperforms several DL architectures with fewer parameters.