Enhanced corn leaf disease detection using sharpness-aware minimization optimized CNNs.

Abstract

Crop diseases significantly threaten global food security by directly affecting the crop yield and quality. The traditional diagnostic methods are labour intensive and human error prone. However, the existing deep learning solutions suffer with poor generalization due to the sharp loss landscapes. The proposed work addresses this limitation and optimizes the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) using the Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM). This method minimizes both the training loss and loss landscape sharpness and enables the model to converge to a flatter-minima with improved generalization. The proposed work is evaluated on 60,000 corn leaf image samples for four classes with 15,000 balanced samples per class after augmentation. The optimized CNN model has achieved 99.66% test accuracy at 0.33% classification error rate and outperforms the conventional optimizers like Adam (98.44% accuracy) and the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The state-of-the-art analysis presents a 99% average precision rate along with 99.66% F1-score and 0.0013% mean squared error (MSE). The quantized model achieves an inference latency of 22.7 ms/image (≈44 FPS) on a Raspberry Pi 4 and reduces model overfitting and enhances feature discriminability. These results underscore the potential of SAM-based optimization in precision agriculture by driving a scalable automation of disease management. This work bridges the gap between theoretical advances in deep learning optimization and practical deployment in resource-constrained farming environments.

Plant phenotyping relevance

トウモロコシ葉画像から病害を分類するCNNの最適化と性能評価が中心であり、植物の病害状態を画像から推定するフェノタイピング手法に該当する。

Code and data availability

The paper's Data availability statement lists the public corn leaf image datasets used for its disease-classification experiments (Kaggle corn/maize leaf disease dataset, New Bangladeshi crop disease dataset, New Plant Diseases Dataset, and the MahindiNet maize leaf disease dataset on Science Data Bank). No author code