Enhanced Plant Leaf Disease Detection Using CLAHE-Processed Images and Custom CNN Deep Learning Architecture

Abstract

This study aims to develop an efficient and accurate deep learning-based model for the classification of plant leaf diseases using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The objective is to automate disease detection in agricultural crops to assist farmers and agricultural experts in early and reliable diagnosis. The model is trained on the publicly available “Plant Village CLAHE Processed Data” dataset, which includes high-resolution RGB images of healthy and diseased plant leaves. Images are preprocessed through resizing (128×128), normalized, and split into training, validation, and test sets. Data augmentation techniques such as flipping, zooming, and rotation are used to improve generalization. A custom CNN architecture comprising convolutional, pooling, dense, and dropout layers is employed and trained using the Adam optimizer. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) ensures data quality and balance. The model achieves impressive results, with 93% test accuracy, 91% precision, 93% recall, and an F1-score of 92%, indicating robust performance in identifying diverse plant diseases. Training accuracy reached 94.64% with a validation accuracy of 92.95%, confirming minimal overfitting. These results validate the model’s reliability for practical use in smart farming solutions, especially in mobile or IoT-based applications for real-time disease monitoring and precision agriculture.

Code and data availability

The paper's plant-phenotyping input is the publicly available Kaggle 'Plant Village CLAHE Processed Data' image dataset, explicitly named and linked by the authors as the data used for all model training and evaluation. No author analysis code or trained model is released.