Effective recognition of fruit leaf diseases has a substantial impact on agro‐based economies. Several fruit diseases exist that badly impact the yield and quality of fruits. A naked‐eye inspection of an infected region is a difficult and tedious process; therefore, it is required to have an automated system for accurate recognition of the disease. It is widely understood that low contrast images affect identification and classification accuracy. Here a parallel framework for real‐time apple leaf disease identification and classification is proposed. Initially, a hybrid contrast stretching method to increase the visual impact of an image is proposed and then the MASK RCNN is configured to detect the infected regions. In parallel, the enhanced images are utilized for training a pre‐trained CNN model for features extraction. The Kapur's entropy along MSVM (EaMSVM) approach‐based selection method is developed to select strong features for the final classification. The Plant Village dataset is employed for the experimental process and achieve the best accuracy of 96.6% on the ensemble subspace discriminant analysis (ESDA) classifier. A comparison with the previous techniques illustrates the superiority of the proposed framework.

Recent technological developments pave the path for deep learning-based techniques to be used in almost every domain of life. The precision of deep learning techniques make it possible for these to be used in the medical field for the classification and detection of various diseases. Recently, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has put a lot of pressure on the health system all around the world. The diagnosis of COVID-19 is possible by PCR testing and medical imagining. Since COVID-19 is highly contagious, diagnosis using chest X-ray is considered safe in various situations. In this study, a deep learning-based technique is proposed to classify COVID-19 infection from other non-COVID-19 infections. To classify COVID-19, three different pre-trained models named EfficientNetB1, NasNetMobile and MobileNetV2 are used. The augmented dataset is used for training deep learning models while two different training strategies have been used for classification. In this study, not only are the deep learning model fine-tuned but also the hyperparameters are fine-tuned, which significantly improves the performance of the fine-tuned deep learning models. Moreover, the classification head is regularized to improve the performance. For the evaluation of the proposed techniques, several performance parameters are used to gauge the performance. EfficientNetB1 with regularized classification head outperforms the other models. The proposed technique successfully classifies four classes that include COVID-19, viral pneumonia, lung opacity, and normal, with an accuracy of 96.13%. The proposed technique shows superiority in terms of accuracy when compared with recent techniques present in the literature.

Skin cancer is among the most prevalent and life-threatening forms of cancer that occur worldwide. Traditional methods of skin cancer detection need an in-depth physical examination by a medical professional, which is time-consuming in some cases. Recently, computer-aided medical diagnostic systems have gained popularity due to their effectiveness and efficiency. These systems can assist dermatologists in the early detection of skin cancer, which can be lifesaving. In this paper, the pre-trained MobileNetV2 and DenseNet201 deep learning models are modified by adding additional convolution layers to effectively detect skin cancer. Specifically, for both models, the modification includes stacking three convolutional layers at the end of both the models. A thorough comparison proves that the modified models show their superiority over the original pre-trained MobileNetV2 and DenseNet201 models. The proposed method can detect both benign and malignant classes. The results indicate that the proposed Modified DenseNet201 model achieves 95.50% accuracy and state-of-the-art performance when compared with other techniques present in the literature. In addition, the sensitivity and specificity of the Modified DenseNet201 model are 93.96% and 97.03%, respectively.

In recent years, the field of deep learning has played an important role towards automatic detection and classification of diseases in vegetables and fruits. This in turn has helped in improving the quality and production of vegetables and fruits. Citrus fruits are well known for their taste and nutritional values. They are one of the natural and well known sources of vitamin C and planted worldwide. There are several diseases which severely affect the quality and yield of citrus fruits. In this paper, a new deep learning based technique is proposed for citrus disease classification. Two different pre-trained deep learning models have been used in this work. To increase the size of the citrus dataset used in this paper, image augmentation techniques are used. Moreover, to improve the visual quality of images, hybrid contrast stretching has been adopted. In addition, transfer learning is used to retrain the pre-trained models and the feature set is enriched by using feature fusion. The fused feature set is optimized using a meta-heuristic algorithm, the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA). The selected features are used for the classification of six different diseases of citrus plants. The proposed technique attains a classification accuracy of 95.7% with superior results when compared with recent techniques.

Recent advances in deep learning for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification have shown exceptional performance in resource management and environmental planning through land use classification. Despite these successes, challenges continue to persist in land use classification due to the complex topology of natural and man-made structures. The uneven distribution of land cover introduces spectral-spatial variability, causing inter- and intra-class similarity. To address this issue, this study adopts a hybrid approach that combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and a transformer model. The technique comprises three key components: a spectral-spatial convolutional module (SSCM), a spatial attention module (SAM), and a transformer module. Each component facilitates the others in the process of classification. SSCM is used to extract shallow features with the help of dilated convolutional layers, while the SAM enhances spatial features for further processing. Additionally, a transformer module with a local neighborhood attention mechanism is employed to extract local semantic information. Several experiments conducted on the Indian Pines and Pavia University hyperspectral datasets validate the performance of the proposed technique, demonstrating higher classification accuracy compared to recent methods in the literature. The technique achieves average accuracies of 97.24% and 99.33% on the Indian Pines and Pavia University datasets, respectively, thus demonstrating its effectiveness for land resource management and environmental planning.

Recent advances in AI technology have paved the way to precisely detect and classify fruit and vegetable diseases. Vision based accurate detection and classification techniques can help farmers to quickly identify different types of plant and fruit diseases. Citrus fruits are globally famous due to their taste and nutrients. In this paper, a deep learning-based technique is proposed for classification of six different citrus diseases that severely affect the yield and quality of citrus fruits. Data augmentation is performed to enlarge the privately acquired dataset. Later the augmented dataset is used to retrain two lightweight pre-trained deep learning models; the SqueezeNet and MobileNetV2. Features are extracted from the retrained models which are subsequently optimized by using the Whale Optimization Algorithm. Classification results obtained from both the models show that the SqueezeNet model outperforms MobileNetV2 and attains an accuracy of 96%. The proposed citrus fruit disease classification technique also outperforms when compared with a current technique proposed in the literature