Design and Implementation of FourCropNet: A CNN-Based System for Efficient Multi-Crop Disease Detection and Management

Abstract: Plant disease detection is a critical task in agriculture, directly impacting crop yield, food security, and sustainable farming practices. This study proposes FourCropNet, a novel deep learning model designed to detect diseases in multiple crops, including CottonLeaf, Grape, Soybean, and Corn. The model leverages an advanced architecture comprising residual blocks for efficient feature extraction, attention mechanisms to enhance focus on disease-relevant regions, and lightweight layers for computational efficiency. These components collectively enable FourCropNet to achieve superior performance across varying datasets and class complexities, from single-crop datasets to combined datasets with 15 classes. The proposed model was evaluated on diverse datasets, demonstrating high accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, and F1 scores. Notably, FourCropNet achieved the highest accuracy of 99.7% for Grape, 99.5% for Corn, and 95.3% for the combined dataset. Its scalability and ability to generalize across datasets underscore its robustness. Comparative analysis shows that FourCropNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models such as MobileNet, VGG16, and EfficientNet across various metrics. FourCropNet's innovative design and consistent performance make it a reliable solution for real-time disease detection in agriculture. This model has the potential to assist farmers in timely disease diagnosis, reducing economic losses and promoting sustainable agricultural practices.