AI-driven grape crop risk evaluation with automated leaf disease segmentation triggered by environmental susceptibility conditions

Early disease diagnosis plays a key role in grape production for minimizing crop risk and maximizing yield. Downy Mildew, Powdery Mildew, and Bacterial Leaf Spot are some of the major diseases that threaten productivity and require timely and accurate diagnosis. This research introduces a new multi-model framework that integrates AI-based image segmentation triggered by Environmental Susceptibility Conditions to inform precision grape farming. The proposed method combines a soft-voting ensemble of the DeepLabV3+, U-Net, and FCN-8’s models for segmentation of diseased and healthy leaf areas with high accuracy, by understanding environment data to evaluate the risk of disease propagation. Major contributions of the study are the understanding of environmental conditions for context-aware disease propagation, an efficient ensemble segmentation method for accurate leaf disease segmentation and severity analysis, performed on a self-collected dataset from a grape farm in Nashik, Maharashtra, India. The system enables early warning and decision support mechanisms to promote sustainable disease management in grape cultivation, with potential implications for reducing unnecessary pesticide usage. Experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed method, with segmentation accuracy of 96.81% and precision of 99.09%, with a Dice score of 0.95 and a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 0.91, demonstrating excellent robustness under noise conditions. Unlike existing studies either image or sensor-approaches, this work introduces the integration of image data and knowledge of environmental insights offers a scalable, reliable, and real-time disease monitoring solution aligned with the goals of smart and sustainable farming.