MCCLDP: Multi Class Cotton Leaf Diseases Prediction and Classification using Deep Learning Model

Cotton plant disease detection is critical for sustainable agriculture and reducing crop losses. This paper proposes a novel Multi-Stream Attention-Guided Hybrid CNN (MAH-CNN) for accurate classification of cotton leaf diseases. The model leverages pre-trained ResNet152v2 and DenseNet-121 backbones for hierarchical feature extraction, complemented by a shallow CNN for localized texture analysis. A spatial attention mechanism enhances focus on disease-relevant regions, mitigating background noise. Features from the global and local streams are fused and passed through a lightweight classification head. The model achieves superior performance in terms of accuracy 97.32%, F1 score 98%, and specificity 100% on benchmark datasets which are available in open access, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. The integration of Grad-CAM provides interpretability, fostering trust in automated disease detection systems.