Enhancing Mango Fruit Disease Severity Assessment with CNN and SVM-Based Classification

The mango leaf powdery mildew disease poses a serious threat to mango production society globally by significantly lowering yield and quality. For timely intervention and efficient management, early disease detection and classification are important. In this research and education area, a novel hybrid approach utilizes Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Support Vector Machines to identify the mango leaf powdery mildew disease based on four severity levels (SVM). Three phases make up the proposed approach: data structure, CNN-selected attributes, and SVM classification. We collect and preprocess images of mango leaves during the data organization step, and in the CNN - attributes selection phase, we apply a CNN model for feature extraction and selection. For the mango leaf powdery mildew dataset, we improve the CNN model to find the most relevant features for the classification task. The SVM - classification step includes training an SVM model on the obtained features and refining the hyperparameters via k-fold cross-validation. The proposed CNN and SVM hybrid multi-classification model for mango leaf powdery mildew disease achieved an overall accuracy of 89.29%. A dataset of 2559 images with 4 severity levels was utilized. The model works well overall, as a macro-average F1-score of 90.10, the weighted average F1-score's minimal value of 53.85%. The model is less successful in predicting instances for classes with smaller support proportions, as shown by the micro-average F1-score, which is 89.29% and is lower overall than the macro-average F1-score.