Crop disease diagnosis and prediction using two-stream hybrid convolutional neural networks

Crop diseases significantly impact yield and quality, posing a direct threat to food security. The application of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in crop disease recognition has notably improved diagnosis accuracy and efficiency. This study presents an innovative crop disease classification model based on the VGG-16 network. Enhancements include the incorporation of Batch Normalization (BN) and a novel activation function synergizing with Exponential Linear Units (ELU), improving model convergence speed and accuracy. Additionally, Global Average Pooling (GAP) is integrated to streamline the network architecture, and the InceptionV2 module is introduced to extract leaf disease features from different dimensions, enhancing model robustness. Validation on the PlantVillage dataset shows an accuracy rate of 98.89%, demonstrating the model's competitiveness and its potential to support sustainable agricultural production.