An efficient corn leaf disease prediction using adaptive color edge segmentation with Resnext101 model

Corn leaf disease prediction is essential in ensuring agricultural productivity and food security. Although classical segmentation and classification techniques have been used to identify diseases, they often fail to deal with complex leaf structures. Thus, deep learning has attracted growing attention for automatically learning discriminative features from data. This paper proposes a new approach to predicting corn leaf disease using deep learning and classical segmentation techniques for improved accuracy and efficiency. The proposed work presents an adaptive colour edge segmentation method improved by a hill-climbing search for robust feature extraction according to the diversified nature of corn leaves. With the help of stochastic hill climbing, the segmentation process is optimized by adaptively changing parameters to get better segmentation accuracy. After that, features are extracted and provided as input into a ResNeXt-101 model for disease classification. The novel activation function in ResNeXt-101 combines the Adam optimizer with a Gaussian-based GELU to enhance nonlinearity to the smooth activation of GELU. The results obtained from experiments show that the proposed approach is practical. The ResNeXt-101 model has achieved overwhelming performance, with 99% for testing accuracy and a minimum loss of 0.01, proving its superior generalization capability and robustness. The proposed work was performed with no overfitting and free from local minima during the training process.