A Resource-Efficient Hybrid CNN-LSTM Network for Image-Based Bean Leaf Disease Classification

Accurate and resource-efficient automated diagnosis is a cornerstone of modern agricultural expert systems. While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have established benchmarks in plant pathology, their ability to capture long-range spatial dependencies is often limited by standard pooling layers, and their high memory footprint hinders deployment on portable devices. This paper proposes a lightweight hybrid CNN-LSTM system for bean leaf disease classification. By integrating an LSTM layer to model the spatial–sequential relationships within feature maps, our hybrid architecture achieves a 94.36% accuracy and 94.38% F1 score while maintaining an exceptionally small footprint of 1.86 MB, a 70% reduction in size compared to traditional CNN-based systems. Furthermore, we provide a systematic evaluation of image augmentation strategies, demonstrating that tailored transformations are superior to generic combinations for maintaining the integrity of diagnostic patterns. Results on the ibean dataset confirm that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art F1 scores of 99.22% with EfficientNet-B7+LSTM, providing a potentially robust and scalable framework for real-time agricultural decision support in resource-constrained environments. The code and augmented datasets used in this study are publicly available on this GitHub repo.