Utilizing deep learning models for early detection and classification of fruit diseases: towards sustainable agriculture and enhanced food quality.

Productivity and quality of food are crucial for populations around the world. However, food faces challenges due to the threats of fruit diseases, which lead to poor food quality. Therefore, early detection and classification of fruit diseases are important to help farmers detect and overcome these diseases, thereby improving food quality and productivity. One of the biggest challenges in the agriculture field is classifying and detecting fruit diseases using traditional manual visual grading. As a result, deep learning and computer vision models have emerged as new methods for visual grading, offering higher accuracy in classification and detection. This study proposes deep learning models for fruit disease detection and classification in the early stages. Five deep learning models are used: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), DenseNet121, EfficientNetB3, Xception, and ResNet50. These models are applied to detect six types of fruit diseases, including orange, grape, mango, guava, apple, and banana plant diseases. Image preprocessing and data augmentation techniques were employed for image processing. The results show accuracies of 96.25%, 99.14%, 96.17%, 94.06%, 96.72%, and 99.33% for the CNN, EfficientNetB3, ResNet50, DenseNet121, ResNet50, and EfficientNetB3 models, respectively, for detecting orange, grape, mango, banana, guava, and apple plant diseases. We compared our models with other deep learning models, and the model that utilized image preprocessing and data augmentation techniques demonstrated higher accuracy and performance. We recommend the EfficientNetB3 model for fruit disease detection based on these results.