Advanced deep transfer learning techniques for efficient detection of cotton plant diseases.

Introduction: Cotton, being a crucial cash crop globally, faces significant challenges due to multiple diseases that adversely affect its quality and yield. To identify such diseases is very important for the implementation of effective management strategies for sustainable agriculture. Image recognition plays an important role for the timely and accurate identification of diseases in cotton plants as it allows farmers to implement effective interventions and optimize resource allocation. Additionally, deep learning has begun as a powerful technique for to detect diseases in crops using images. Hence, the significance of this work lies in its potential to mitigate the impact of these diseases, which cause significant damage to the cotton and decrease fibre quality and promote sustainable agricultural practices. Methods: This paper investigates the role of deep transfer learning techniques such as EfficientNet models, Xception, ResNet models, Inception, VGG, DenseNet, MobileNet, and InceptionResNet for cotton plant disease detection. A complete dataset of infected cotton plants having diseases like Bacterial Blight, Target Spot, Powdery Mildew, Aphids, and Army Worm along with the healthy ones is used. After pre-processing the images of the dataset, their region of interest is obtained by applying feature extraction techniques such as the generation of the biggest contour, identification of extreme points, cropping of relevant regions, and segmenting the objects using adaptive thresholding. Results and Discussion: During experimentation, it is found that the EfficientNetB3 model outperforms in accuracy, loss, as well as root mean square error by obtaining 99.96%, 0.149, and 0.386 respectively. However, other models also show the good performance in terms of precision, recall, and F1 score, with high scores close to 0.98 or 1.00, except for VGG19. The findings of the paper emphasize the prospective of deep transfer learning as a viable technique for cotton plant disease diagnosis by providing a cost-effective and efficient solution for crop disease monitoring and management. This strategy can also help to improve agricultural practices by ensuring sustainable cotton farming and increased crop output.