DLMC-Net: Deeper lightweight multi-class classification model for plant leaf disease detection

Plant-leaf disease detection is one of the key problems of smart agriculture which has a significant impact on the global economy. To mitigate this, intelligent agricultural solutions are evolving that aid farmer to take preventive measures for improving crop production. With the advancement of deep learning, many convolutional neural network models have blazed their way to the identification of plant-leaf diseases. However, these models are limited to the detection of specific crops only. Therefore, this paper presents a new deeper lightweight convolutional neural network architecture (DLMC-Net) to perform plant leaf disease detection across multiple crops for real-time agricultural applications. In the proposed model, a sequence of collective blocks is introduced along with the passage layer to extract deep features. These benefits in feature propagation and feature reuse, which results in handling the vanishing gradient problem. Moreover, point-wise and separable convolution blocks are employed to reduce the number of trainable parameters. The efficacy of the proposed DLMC-Net model is validated across four publicly available datasets, namely citrus, cucumber, grapes, and tomato. Experimental results of the proposed model are compared against seven state-of-the-art models on eight parameters, namely accuracy, error, precision, recall, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and Matthews correlation coefficient. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model has surpassed all the considered models, even under complex background conditions, with an accuracy of 93.56%, 92.34%, 99.50%, and 96.56% on citrus, cucumber, grapes, and tomato, respectively. Moreover, the proposed DLMC-Net requires only 6.4 million trainable parameters, which is the second best among the compared models. Therefore, it can be asserted that the proposed model is a viable alternative to perform plant leaf disease detection across multiple crops.