Plant disease detection via Convolutional Neural Networks with Transfer Learning on MobileNetV2 - benchmarked across multiple architectures.
Plant diseases cause significant crop losses globally. Early, automated detection using computer vision can help farmers act quickly. The challenge is evaluating which deep learning approaches work best given the practical constraints of small dataset sizes and limited compute resources.
A systematic comparison of three architectures — baseline CNN, deeper custom CNN, and fine-tuned MobileNetV2 — using Transfer Learning to leverage ImageNet feature detectors. Fine-tuning the upper layers adapts the model to plant disease patterns while preserving low-level feature knowledge.