Novel methodology for apple leaf disease classification with PCNN-IELM

Agriculture is crucial to the global economy, particularly in ensuring food security. Recent trends indicate that various plant diseases are causing substantial financial losses in the agricultural sector worldwide. Traditional manual inspection methods for detecting fruit and plant diseases are labor-intensive and inefficient. Adopting automated disease detection technologies could significantly enhance early diagnosis and reduce the economic impact of these diseases on agriculture. This study introduces an advanced model for classifying apple diseases by integrating a pre-trained convolutional neural network (PCNN), such as VGG16, VGG19, or ResNet50, with an incremental extreme learning machine (I-ELM) for efficient feature extraction and classification. A key innovation of this model is replacing the PCNN’s fully connected layer with the I-ELM, which eliminates the lengthy back-propagation process and significantly reduces training time. Integrating I-ELM with PCNN harnesses the rapid learning capabilities and robust generalization of I-ELM with the superior feature extraction abilities of CNNs. I-ELM simplifies the network architecture by avoiding the complex neural networks commonly used in other methods. The model’s effectiveness is rigorously evaluated on the well-known Plant Village dataset, demonstrating its ability to identify various apple diseases through performance metrics such as precision, sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and the F1-score. Comparing existing deep learning models using these metrics highlights its superior performance. This innovation is up-and-coming for intelligent agricultural systems, offering an effective solution for classifying apple diseases and enabling timely and innovative farming practices.