Deep learning based ensemble model for accurate tomato leaf disease classification by leveraging ResNet50 and MobileNetV2 architectures

Global food security depends on tomato growing, but several fungal, bacterial, and viral illnesses seriously reduce productivity and quality, therefore causing major financial losses. Reducing these impacts depends on early, exact diagnosis of diseases. This work provides a deep learning-based ensemble model for tomato leaf disease classification combining MobileNetV2 and ResNet50. To improve feature extraction, the models were tweaked by changing their output layers with GlobalAverage Pooling2D, Batch Normalization, Dropout, and Dense layers. To take use of their complimentary qualities, the feature maps from both models were combined. This study uses a publicly available dataset from Kaggle for tomato leaf disease classification. Training on a dataset of 11,000 annotated pictures spanning 10 disease categories, including bacterial spot, early blight, late blight, leaf mold, septoria leaf spot, spider mites, target spot, yellow leaf curl virus, mosaic virus, and healthy leaves. Data preprocessing included image resizing and splitting, along with an 80-10-10 split, allocating 80% for training, 10% for testing, and 10% for validation to ensure a balanced evaluation. The proposed model with a 99.91% test accuracy, the suggested model was quite remarkable. Furthermore, guaranteeing strong classification performance across all disease categories, the model showed great precision (99.92%), recall (99.90%), and an F1-score of 99.91%. With few misclassifications, the confusion matrix verified almost flawless classification even further. These findings show how well deep learning can automate tomato disease diagnosis, therefore providing a scalable and quite accurate solution for smart agriculture. By means of early intervention and precision agriculture techniques, the suggested strategy has the potential to improve crop health monitoring, reduce economic losses, and encourage sustainable farming practices.