Maize Plant Disease Prediction of UAV Images for Precision Agriculture Using Fusion of Multimodal

The agriculture sector is vital to a country’s economic and productive development. With technological advancements, we can identify plant diseases in their early stages, similar to how human diseases are diagnosed, and avoid significant financial loss. For example, a new technique has been developed to detect diseases in maize crops, a widely used raw product in the food industry and precision agriculture. Furthermore, farmers ensure the fields do not remain wet for extended periods to prevent fungus infection. Currently, machine learning and deep learning approaches are being utilized, making agriculture one of the most researched topics in AI. This study proposes a novel framework for predicting maize plant disease using a fusion of multi-deep learning models. The proposed framework uses a four-stage pipeline for detecting disease in maize plants by fusion of Xception, DenseNet-121, and ensembling of Xception and DenseNet-121 models to achieve excellent results on the OSF drone image dataset, which consists of 1821 high-resolution images of maize plants taken from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The accuracy of our proposed approach is 96.95%, which is highly effective, considering the challenges posed by drone images.