CropHealthNet: Potato Disease Detection Using Depthwise Separable Convolutional Neural Networks

Plant diseases are one of the primary factors that threaten food security, crop yields, harvesting, and sustainable production in the agricultural sector. In this context, early disease diagnosis is essential for enhancing agricultural productivity and reducing crop losses. In modern agricultural practices, machine learning-based approaches offer effective and innovative solutions for detecting and classifying plant diseases. These modern and innovative methods generally reach high accuracy rates with large-scale image datasets. In particular, deep learning algorithms have achieved significant success in modeling disease’s spread dynamics and detecting early disease symptoms. In this study, a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based, lightly parallel deep learning model called CropHealthNet is proposed for classifying potato leaf diseases. The model is designed with special depthwise separable convolution-based convolution layers to reduce the computational cost of CNN. CropHealthNet is a low-parameter model suitable for real-time operation, capable of recognizing disease-specific patterns with high accuracy. CropHealthNet aims to achieve deep and comprehensive feature extraction through its parallel structure and varying channel numbers. The features from each parallel structure are combined at multiple levels, increasing the model’s ability to detect abstract and deep patterns. Moreover, the proposed model has extremely low computational complexity with only 0.47 million parameters and 0.59 GFLOPs, thus offering high efficiency compared to existing approaches. The effectiveness of the proposed model was evaluated using the PlantVillage Potato Dataset. Since the PlantVillage Potato Dataset has an unbalanced data distribution, the number of data for each class has been equalized using the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) to evaluate the model’s performance against data imbalance. The proposed model succeeded in achieving 99.30% and 99.50% accuracy rates in the tests conducted with unbalanced and balanced datasets, respectively. Experimental findings show that the proposed model generalizes well despite data imbalance and correctly classify diseases on potato leaves. Therefore, the model can demonstrate strong performance in agricultural practices and can detect plant diseases under real-world conditions.