A Novel Multi Class Real World Fruit and Leaf Disease Image Dataset for Crop Health Analysis

Abstract

Abstract Plant diseases affecting leaves and fruits cause substantial yield and economic losses worldwide, particularly in horticultural crops cultivated under diverse agro-climatic conditions. Early and accurate disease diagnosis is essential for effective crop management; however, manual inspection is time-consuming, subjective, and often infeasible at large scale. In this work, we present the Tomato–Chilli–Papaya (TCP) Fruit and Leaf Disease Dataset, a comprehensive multi-crop image dataset designed to support deep learning-based plant disease recognition. The dataset comprises labeled RGB images of healthy and diseased leaves and fruits from three economically important crops—tomato, chilli, and papaya—captured under real-field and semi-controlled environments, reflecting significant variability in illumination, background complexity, and disease severity. To demonstrate the applicability of the dataset, several commonly used convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, including VGG, ResNet, DenseNet, MobileNet, and EfficientNet models, were trained and evaluated on the TCP dataset using transfer learning. Experimental results show that deep CNN models can effectively learn discriminative visual features corresponding to disease-specific patterns such as leaf spots, lesions, discoloration, curling, and fruit surface abnormalities. Lightweight models such as MobileNet achieve competitive performance with reduced computational cost, while deeper architectures provide improved accuracy at the expense of higher complexity. The results highlight the importance of dataset diversity for robust model generalization across multiple crops and plant organs. The TCP dataset provides a challenging benchmark for single-crop and multi-crop disease classification and supports the development of advanced deep learning, attention-based, and explainable AI models for precision agriculture. By enabling reproducible research and realistic performance evaluation, this dataset contributes toward scalable and practical AI-driven plant disease diagnosis systems aimed at reducing yield losses and supporting sustainable agriculture.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物の葉・果実の病徴を画像から評価する大規模データセットとベンチマークを中心に扱っており、植物病害状態の画像ベース表現型解析に該当する。

Code and data availability

The paper introduces the TCP (Tomato-Chilli-Papaya) fruit and leaf disease image dataset and reports CNN experiments on it. The dataset is publicly deposited on Mendeley Data, and the authors state that analysis code is available on GitHub. Both are paper-specific, public, and actionable.