Robust Deep Convolutional Solutions for Identifying Biotic Crop Stress in Wild Environments

In the realm of agricultural automation, the precise identification of crop stress holds immense significance for enhancing crop productivity. Existing methods primarily focus on controlled environments, which may not accurately reflect field conditions. Field-based leaf image analysis poses challenges due to varying image quality and sunlight intensity. Moreover, the complexity of crop stress images, with their random lesion distribution, diverse symptoms, and complex backgrounds, further complicates the analysis. To overcome these limitations, a lightweight hybrid convolutional neural network has been developed. This system integrates the powerful three-deep blocks model with an autoencoder running in parallel to highlight regions of crop stress effectively. To support this approach, we have introduced the Indian Rice Disease Dataset (IRDD) with labeled images. The proposed system reports an average true positive rate (TPR) of 0.8766 and an average positive predicted value of 0.8720 on IRDD, which are higher than other state-of-the-art crop disease detection models. The system is validated on benchmark datasets, yielding significant results: TPR of 0.9870 (rice), 0.9985 (tomato), and 0.8559 (corn). Furthermore, the proposed model outperforms recent state-of-the-art works on the benchmark PlantDoc dataset, showing its effectiveness in generalizing plant disease identification tasks. Finally, an ablation study has been carried out to explore the importance of the two parallel branches. Overall, this study acts as a bridge between advanced science and practical application, showcasing how interdisciplinary automation could revolutionize crop disease identification, improve agricultural efficiency, and reshape broader industrial practices.