GLD-Det: Guava Leaf Disease Detection in Real-Time Using Lightweight Deep Learning Approach Based on MobileNet

Abstract

The guava plant is widely cultivated in various regions of the Sub-Continent and Asian countries, including Bangladesh, due to its adaptability to different soil conditions and climate environments. The fruit plays a crucial role in providing food security and nutrition for the human body. However, guava plants are susceptible to various infectious leaf diseases, leading to significant crop losses. To address this issue, several heavyweight deep learning models have been developed in precision agriculture. This research proposes a transfer learning-based model named GLD-Det, which is designed to be both lightweight and robust, enabling real-time detection of guava leaf disease using two benchmark datasets. GLD-Det is a modified version of MobileNet, featuring additional components with two pooling layers such as max and global average, three batch normalisation layers, three dropout layers, ReLU as an activation function with four dense layers, and SoftMax as a classification layer with the last lighter dense layer. The proposed GLD-Det model outperforms all existing models with impressive accuracy, precision, recall, and AUC score with values of 0.98, 0.98, 0.97, and 0.99 on one dataset, and with values of 0.97, 0.97, 0.96, and 0.99 for the other dataset, respectively. Furthermore, to enhance trust and transparency, the proposed model has been explained using the Grad-CAM technique, a class-discriminative localisation approach.