A Hybrid Transfer Learning Framework for Corn Crop Detection Using Deep Convolutional Networks

Abstract

Corn is a staple crop of global significance; however, foliar diseases may lead to 30–60% yield loss if not detected at an early stage. Conventional visual inspection is time-consuming, subjective, and difficult to scale for smallholder farmers worldwide. To overcome these issues, we present Corn Transfer Learning Network (CTL-Net), an end-to-end hybrid deep learning model for corn leaf disease identification. CTL-Net, which combines Inception-ResNet-v2 as the backbone and MobileNetV3 as a feature extractor in parallel convolutional streams, simultaneously learns diverse scales of texture information from low-level textures, mid-level structural patterns, and high-level disease semantics of RGB leaf images. Adaptive feature fusion is formulated through learnable weighting coefficients and bi-directional spatial–channel attention mechanisms, which further enhance feature discriminability and robustness. The proposed approach is tested on an extensive dataset of 12,456 images from 10 corn diseases, including Northern Leaf Blight, Common Rust, Gray Leaf Spot, and Cercospora Leaf Spot, acquired under controlled and real-field conditions. CTL-Net attains the highest classification accuracy of 99.42%, outperforming DenseNet121 (97.92%), EfficientNetB3 (97.35%), and general stacking models (97.89%). Robustness experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method against illumination variations, additive noise, and partial occlusions. CTL-Net enables real-time inference with a latency of 42 ms on an NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU. Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping++ (Grad-CAM++)-based interpretability analysis results in a mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 87.6% with expert-annotated disease regions. Five-fold cross-validation, ablation studies, and statistical significance testing (p

Code and data availability

The paper states its final curated corn leaf disease dataset (12,456 images, 10 classes) is publicly available via the authors' GitHub repository vishruthkp/maizedataset (reference [30] and Data Availability statement). The Kaggle PlantVillage and Corn or Maize Leaf Disease datasets are cited source inputs, not paper-­