Deep learning framework using UAV imagery for multi-disease detection in cereal crops

Agriculture is a cornerstone of the economies of many countries, and wheat is a staple cereal crop that sustains nearly half of the worldwide population. However, production of wheat is highly vulnerable to biotic stress such as pathogens and pests, as well as adverse environmental conditions. These factors significantly affect yield and quality, posing critical threats to food security and economic resilience. Conventional disease detection methods often involve intense human labor, prolonged procedures, and are predisposed to subjectivity. Therefore, the development of an automated, accurate, and real-time disease monitoring system is imperative for modern precision agriculture. We propose a hybrid deep learning based Multi-Disease Detection Framework for Wheat Diseases (MDDM-WD) for the identification of multiple wheat diseases using UAV imagery. The framework leverages the pre-trained VGG-16 convolutional neural network for deep feature extraction via a transfer learning approach. These features are subsequently classified using Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), XGBoost, and Bernoulli Naïve Bayes (BNB) algorithms of machine learning. The model is trained and evaluated on a custom-curated dataset, containing wheat diseases: stripe rust, powdery mildew, scab (Fusarium head blight), and yellow dwarf. Evaluation of experiments demonstrates that the classification performance is enhanced significantly through our hybrid approach, with accuracy ranging from 74 to 97%, precision from 73 to 96%, and recall from 73 to 95.7%. The SVM-based variant of the model achieved the highest performance, yielding 96% precision, 95.7% recall, 96% F1-score, and 97% accuracy. The proposed two-phase fine-tuned system demonstrates its effectiveness and efficiency in detecting multiple wheat diseases. The MDDM-WD model offers a resource-efficient and scalable approach for early disease detection, supporting informed decision-making for farmers, agronomists, and policymakers in advancing sustainable agriculture.