Advancing sustainable agriculture through multi-parameter fuzzy soft set-based plant disease classification

Plant diseases significantly affect agricultural productivity and global food security, while accurate disease identification remains challenging because of uncertain and overlapping visual symptoms in leaf images. Existing deep learning approaches often require large annotated datasets and suffer from limited interpretability in practical agricultural environments. This study presents a multi-parameter improved fuzzy soft set-based framework for plant disease classification using tomato leaf images from the PlantVillage dataset. The objective is to develop an interpretable and reliable classification model capable of handling uncertainty in plant disease patterns through feature-driven fuzzy similarity analysis. The methodology integrates image preprocessing, color and texture feature extraction, variance-based feature weighting, prototype generation using K-means clustering, and fuzzy similarity computation using Mahalanobis distance and Gaussian membership functions. RGB, HSV, and Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) features are extracted from standardized leaf images and evaluated within an improved fuzzy soft classification framework. Performance comparison is carried out using machine learning models including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and Naive Bayes (NB) implemented in Python using Scikit-learn libraries. Experimental simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves competitive classification performance while preserving interpretability and robustness under uncertain feature distributions. Performance evaluation is conducted through accuracy analysis, ROC-AUC curves, confusion matrices, ablation studies, and Wilcoxon Signed-Rank statistical testing. The proposed Improved Fuzzy Soft model achieved an accuracy of 88.57% which is less than LDA (94.92%), Random Forest (97.78%) and SVM (97.94%) classifiers. However, in the cross data set validation, the proposed Improved Fuzzy Soft model achieved an accuracy of 67.35% which is greater than LDA (51.02%), Random Forest (51.02%) and SVM (55.10%) classifiers. Statistical validation using the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test produced a p-value of [Formula: see text], confirming that the performance difference between the Improved Fuzzy Soft framework and the Random Forest classifier is statistically significant under the current experimental setting.