Design and Evaluation of a Hybrid Technique for Detecting Sunflower Leaf Disease Using Deep Learning Approach

Agriculture and plants, which are a component of a nation's internal economy, play an important role in boosting the economy of that country. It becomes critical to preserve plants from infection at an early stage in order to be able to treat them. Previously, recognition and classification were carried out by hand, but this was a time-consuming operation. Nowadays, deep learning algorithms are frequently employed for recognition and classification tasks. As a result, this manuscript investigates the diseases of sunflower leaves, specifically Alternaria leaf blight, Phoma blight, downy mildew, and Verticillium wilt, and proposes a hybrid model for the recognition and classification of sunflower diseases using deep learning techniques. VGG-16 and MobileNet are two transfer learning models that are used for classification purposes, and the stacking ensemble learning approach is used to merge them or create a hybrid model from the two models. This work makes use of a data set that was built by the author with the assistance of Google Images and comprises 329 images of sunflowers divided into five categories. On the basis of accuracy, a comparison is made between several existing deep learning models and the proposed model using the same data set as the original comparison.