Classification of Plant Leaf Diseases Using ResNet18 Enhanced with Inception and Capsule Network

Accurate and early detection of plant leaf diseases is crucial for ensuring crop health and improving agricultural productivity. This work proposes a hybrid deep learning model that combines ResNet18, Inception blocks, and fully connected Capsule layers to classify leaf images of apple, grape, and corn plants into healthy or diseased categories. ResNet18 is used as the backbone for deep feature extraction, while Inception modules enhance the network’s ability to capture multi-scale patterns. Capsule layers are employed at the final stage to retain spatial relationships and pose information, improving the model's ability to recognize complex disease features. The model is trained and evaluated using images from the PlantVillage dataset, with separate configurations for each crop. The proposed model achieved validation accuracies of 99.84% for apple, 100% for grape, and 97.27% for corn. Performance is further assessed using precision, recall, and F1-score, and compared against a baseline ResNet18 model. The results demonstrate that the proposed architecture significantly improves classification accuracy and feature understanding, making it a strong candidate for real-world agricultural disease monitoring systems.