Plant Disease Management: A Fine-Tuned Enhanced CNN Approach with Mobile App Integration for Early Detection and Classification

Abstract Farmers face a daunting challenge in meeting the escalating demands of a rapidly growing population for agricultural products, while plant diseases continue to exact a devastating toll on food production. Despite investing billions of dollars in disease management, agriculturists often struggle to achieve effective disease control without the support of advanced technology. The article explores a deep learning-based approach for disease detection. Specifically, it employs a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture for the detection. For the automated detection of plant disease, using plant images. This paper presents a new model for the early detection of plant detection based on processing plant images. And compare the in-depth performance analysis of hyper parameters in the context of plant disease detection by focusing on three distinct crops: (Apple, Corn, and Potato). Moreover, the data augmentation impact is analyzed. To enhance accessibility for farmers, our model is seamlessly integrated with a mobile application. The experimental results show the efficiency of our fine-tuned enhanced CNN model (E-CNN) achieving 98.17% accuracy on fungal classes. This research endeavors to pave the way for more effective plant disease management and ultimately to improve agricultural productivity in the face of mounting global challenges.