Robust coffee plant disease classification using deep learning and advanced feature engineering techniques

Coffee, the world's most traded tropical crop, is vital to the economies of many producing countries. However, coffee leaf diseases pose a serious threat to coffee quality and sustainable production. Deep learning has shown strong performance in plant disease identification through automatic image classification. Nevertheless, reliance on a single convolutional neural networks (CNNs) architecture restricts feature variability and real-world generalization. Moreover, limited work has systematically combined feature selection/reduction with CNNs, which constrains the advancement of hybrid models capable of capturing complementary features while ensuring computational efficiency without accuracy loss. This article presents an enhanced deep learning-based framework for coffee disease classification incorporating a hybrid strategy that integrates CNNs and advanced feature selection algorithms. GoogLeNet and ResNet18 are paired for complementary feature extraction, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) are employed for dimensionality reduction, and ANOVA and Chi-square are applied to select the most informative features. An Adam optimizer (learning rate = 0.001, batch size = 20, epochs = 50) with early stopping is used for training. Experiments on the BRACOL dataset achieved 99.78% accuracy, with precision, recall, and F1-score all exceeding 99% across classes. To the best of our knowledge, this study systematically integrates GoogLeNet and ResNet18 with PCA/SVD dimensionality reduction and analysis of variance (ANOVA)/Chi-square feature selection, for coffee disease classification, thereby addressing a key gap in prior research.