Hybrid metaheuristic optimization of a DeepFusionNet for plant leaf disease diagnosis and recommendation

Early diagnosis of plant leaf diseases plays an important role in protecting crop yields and supporting sustainable agriculture. This paper proposes an improved DeepFusionNet model optimized through a hybrid Flower Pollination Algorithm and Butterfly Optimization Algorithm, balancing global exploration with local refinement for faster and more stable convergence. The model combines DenseNet201 and MobileNetV2 by compressing their final convolutional feature maps with 1×1 convolutions and fusing them along the channel dimension to form a compact and discriminative representation. This fused representation is then classified using a Random Forest classifier. This framework consistently achieves high accuracy on all eight datasets, with performance ranging between 97.07% and 99.66%. Extensive experiments are performed that include statistical validation, convergence studies, and reliability tests to prove the robustness of the approach. Furthermore, to make it practically useful, the whole system is embedded into a mobile application capable of real-time disease detection and providing actionable recommendations to farmers for the effective treatment and prevention of diseases.