Enhanced-RICAP: a novel data augmentation strategy for improved deep learning-based plant disease identification and mobile diagnosis

Abstract

Introduction Plant diseases pose a significant threat to global food security and agricultural productivity, making accurate and timely disease identification essential for effective crop management and minimizing economic losses. Although data augmentation techniques such as RICAP improve model robustness, their reliance on randomly extracted image regions can introduce label noise, potentially misleading the training of deep learning models. Methods This study introduces Enhanced-RICAP, an advanced data augmentation technique designed to improve the accuracy of deep learning models for plant disease detection. Enhanced-RICAP replaces random patch selection with an attention module guided by class activation maps, focusing on discriminative regions, Enhanced-RICAP reduces label noise and improves model accuracy for plant disease detection, addressing a key limitation of traditional augmentation methods. The method was evaluated using several deep learning architectures, such as ResNet18, ResNet34, ResNet50, EfficientNet-b, and Xception, on the cassava leaf disease and PlantVillage tomato leaf disease datasets. Results The experimental results demonstrate that Enhanced-RICAP consistently outperforms existing augmentation methods, including CutMix, MixUp, CutOut, Hide-and-Seek, and RICAP, across key evaluation metrics: accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The ResNet18+Enhanced-RICAP configuration achieved 99.86% accuracy on the tomato leaf disease dataset, whereas the Xception+Enhanced-RICAP model attained 96.64% accuracy in classifying four cassava leaf disease categories. Discussion and Conclusion To bridge the gap between research and practical application, the ResNet18+Enhanced-RICAP model was deployed in PlantDisease, a mobile application that enables real-time disease identification and management recommendations. This approach supports sustainable agriculture and strengthens food security by providing farmers with accessible and reliable diagnostic tools.

Code and data availability

The supplied blocks contain no paper-specific public asset. The study uses pre-existing public datasets (cassava leaf disease, PlantVillage tomato), which are cited prior resources rather than author-deposited assets, and no code, model checkpoint, or data availability URL is provided in the text.

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