Automated Detection of Maize Leaf Diseases in Agricultural Cyber-Physical Systems

Agricultural cyber-physical systems (ACPS) are an ever-increasing sector that affects the quality and quantity of agricultural products as the population increases rapidly. Maize, also known as ’corn,’ is one of the world’s old food crops, consumed every part of Bharat with 1.4 billion masses across the globe. But a disease, whether on seeds, leaves, or other parts of a crop plant, poses a significant risk to food security. For example, a Maize leaf experiences three diseases-blight, common rust, and gray leaf spot. Early detection and correct identification of these diseases can help restrict the spread of infection and ensure crop quality for long-term health. This paper proposes a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) framework for Maize leaves named "MDCNN" that detects these diseases. The proposed MDCNN model undergoes training and is tuned to detect four prevalent classes of the conditions. The proposed model exercises a voluminous dataset of the diseases. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a training and test accuracy up to 95.51% and 99.54%, respectively. Furthermore, it outperforms many existing methods and delivers a superior disease control solution for Maize leaf diseases.