Machine Learning and Deep Learning for Plant Disease Classification and Detection

• Author(s): N. Sri Janaki Ram; N. Venkata Sai Gopi Chandu; S. Ajay; Reddy Veeramohanarao
• Paper ID: 1717169
• Page: 3382-3385
• Published Date: 30-04-2026
• Published In: Iconic Research And Engineering Journals
• Publisher: IRE Journals
• e-ISSN: 2456-8880
• Volume/Issue: Volume 9 Issue 10 April-2026

Abstract

Plant diseases cause significant losses in global agricultural output, and early, accurate identification remains a major challenge. This paper presents a unified deep learning pipeline that simultaneously localises and classifies plant diseases from leaf images. A YOLOv5s model performs region-level detection, while a transfer-learning-based ResNet50 classifier identifies the specific disease category. The system is trained on the PlantVillage dataset, which contains 54,306 images spanning 38 disease classes across 14 crop species. Preprocessing includes image resizing, normalisation, and a combination of standard and advanced augmentation strategies, namely CutMix and MixUp. ResNet50 is fine-tuned in two phases with Cosine Learning Rate decay, and Test Time Augmentation (TTA) is applied at inference for additional accuracy gains. The ResNet50 classifier achieves 99.1% validation accuracy with TTA, while the YOLOv5s detection model reaches a mAP@0.50 of 0.856. The macro-averaged precision, recall, and F1-score stand at 0.974, 0.968, and 0.971, respectively. The integrated pipeline demonstrates reliable end-to-end performance with 97.6% accuracy on 200 held-out images, offering a practical and scalable solution for precision agriculture.

Keywords

Plant Disease Detection, Deep Learning, ResNet50, YOLOv5, Transfer Learning, Precision Agriculture, CutMix, MixUp, Test Time Augmentation, PlantVillage.

Citations

IRE Journals:
N. Sri Janaki Ram, N. Venkata Sai Gopi Chandu, S. Ajay, Reddy Veeramohanarao "Machine Learning and Deep Learning for Plant Disease Classification and Detection" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals Volume 9 Issue 10 2026 Page 3382-3385 https://doi.org/10.64388/IREV9I10-1717169

IEEE:
N. Sri Janaki Ram, N. Venkata Sai Gopi Chandu, S. Ajay, Reddy Veeramohanarao "Machine Learning and Deep Learning for Plant Disease Classification and Detection" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals, 9(10) https://doi.org/10.64388/IREV9I10-1717169