The timely identification and early prevention of crop diseases are essential for improving production. In this paper, deep convolutional-neural-network (CNN) models are implemented to identify and diagnose diseases in plants from their leaves, since CNNs have achieved impressive results in the field of machine vision. Standard CNN models require a large number of parameters and higher computation cost. In this paper, we replaced standard convolution with depth=separable convolution, which reduces the parameter number and computation cost. The implemented models were trained with an open dataset consisting of 14 different plant species, and 38 different categorical disease classes and healthy plant leaves. To evaluate the performance of the models, different parameters such as batch size, dropout, and different numbers of epochs were incorporated. The implemented models achieved a disease-classification accuracy rates of 98.42%, 99.11%, 97.02%, and 99.56% using InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetB0, respectively, which were greater than that of traditional handcrafted-feature-based approaches. In comparison with other deep-learning models, the implemented model achieved better performance in terms of accuracy and it required less training time. Moreover, the MobileNetV2 architecture is compatible with mobile devices using the optimized parameter. The accuracy results in the identification of diseases showed that the deep CNN model is promising and can greatly impact the efficient identification of the diseases, and may have potential in the detection of diseases in real-time agricultural systems.

The timely identification of plant diseases prevents the negative impact on crops. Convolutional neural network, particularly deep learning is used widely in machine vision and pattern recognition task. Researchers proposed different deep learning models in the identification of diseases in plants. However, the deep learning models require a large number of parameters, and hence the required training time is more and also difficult to implement on small devices. In this paper, we have proposed a novel deep learning model based on the inception layer and residual connection. Depthwise separable convolution is used to reduce the number of parameters. The proposed model has been trained and tested on three different plant diseases datasets. The performance accuracy obtained on plantvillage dataset is 99.39%, on the rice disease dataset is 99.66%, and on the cassava dataset is 76.59%. With fewer number of parameters, the proposed model achieves higher accuracy in comparison with the state-of-art deep learning models.

Landslide is a devastating natural disaster, causing loss of life and property. It is likely to occur more frequently due to increasing urbanization, deforestation, and climate change. Landslide susceptibility mapping is vital to safeguard life and property. This article surveys machine learning (ML) models used for landslide susceptibility mapping to understand the current trend by analyzing published articles based on the ML models, landslide causative factors (LCFs), study location, datasets, evaluation methods, and model performance. Existing literature considered in this comprehensive survey is systematically selected using the ROSES protocol. The trend indicates a growing interest in the field. The choice of LCFs depends on data availability and case study location; China is the most studied location, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) is considered the best evaluation metric. Many ML models have achieved an AUC value > 0.90, indicating high reliability of the susceptibility map generated. This paper also discusses the recently developed hybrid, ensemble, and deep learning (DL) models in landslide susceptibility mapping. Generally, hybrid, ensemble, and DL models outperform conventional ML models. Based on the survey, a few recommendations and future works which may help the new researchers in the field are also presented.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a deadly cognitive condition in which people develop severe dementia symptoms. Neurologists commonly use a series of physical and mental tests to diagnose AD that may not always be effective. Damage to brain cells is the most significant physical change in AD. Proper analysis of brain images may assist in the identification of crucial bio-markers for the disease. Because the development of brain cells is so intricate, traditional image processing algorithms sometimes fail to perceive important bio-markers. The deep neural network (DNN) is a machine learning technique that helps specialists in making appropriate decisions. In this work, we used brain magnetic resonance scans to implement some commonly used DNN models for AD classification. According to the classification results, where the average of multiple metrics is observed, which includes accuracy, precision, recall, and an F1 score, it is found that the DenseNet-121 model achieved the best performance (86.55%). Since DenseNet-121 is a computationally expensive model, we proposed a hybrid technique incorporating LeNet and AlexNet that is light weight and also capable of outperforming DenseNet. To extract important features, we replaced the traditional convolution Layers with three parallel small filters ($1\times 1,3\times 3$, and $5\times 5$). The model functions effectively, with an overall performance rate of 93.58%. Mathematically, it is observed that the proposed model generates significantly fewer convolutional parameters, resulting in a lightweight model that is computationally effective.

Various plant diseases are major threats to agriculture. For timely control of different plant diseases in effective manner, automated identification of diseases are highly beneficial. So far, different techniques have been used to identify the diseases in plants. Deep learning is among the most widely used techniques in recent times due to its impressive results. In this work, we have proposed two methods namely shallow VGG with RF and shallow VGG with Xgboost to identify the diseases. The proposed model is compared with other hand-crafted and deep learning-based approaches. The experiments are carried on three different plants namely corn, potato, and tomato. The considered diseases in corns are Blight, Common rust, and Gray leaf spot, diseases in potatoes are early blight and late blight, and tomato diseases are bacterial spot, early blight, and late blight. The result shows that our implemented shallow VGG with Xgboost model outperforms different deep learning models in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, and specificity. Shallow Visual Geometric Group (VGG) with Xgboost gives the highest accuracy rate of 94.47% in corn, 98.74% in potato, and 93.91% in the tomato dataset. The models are also tested with field images of potato, corn, and tomato. Even in field image the average accuracy obtained using shallow VGG with Xgboost are 94.22%, 97.36%, and 93.14%, respectively.

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a psychological disorder in elderly people which causes severe intellectual disabilities. Proper processing of neuro-images can provide differences in brain tissues which may help in diagnosing the disease more effectively. But, due to the complex structures, this is a challenge in differentiating the brain tissues and classifying AD using traditional classification mechanisms. Deep Neural Network (DNN) is a machine learning technique that has the ability to absorb the most important information for classifying an object accurately. LeNet is a popular DNN based model with a simple and effective architecture that also consumes very less implementation time. As like most of the DNN models, LeNet also uses MaxPooling layer for dimensionality reduction by eliminating the information of minimum valued elements. In brain images low intensity valued pixels also may contain very important features. To keep the minimum valued elements too in the network, we have created a separate layer that performs Min-Pooling operation. MinPooling and MaxPooling layers are then concatenated together. Finally, we have replaced all MaxPooling Layers in LeNet by the concatenated layers. We have analysed and compared the performances of modified LeNet model with 20 other most commonly used DNN models, and some of the related works. It is observed that, the modified LeNet model achieved the highest performances. It is also observed that, original LeNet model can classify AD with a performance rate of 80%, whereas, the proposed modified LeNet model achieved an average performance rate of 96.64%.