AgriMind: An Ensemble Deep Learning Framework for Multi-Class Plant Disease Classification

TL;DR

AgriMind is an ensemble deep learning framework that achieves over 99% accuracy in multi-class plant disease classification, automating manual detection in Bangladesh with high speed.

Contribution

This work introduces a lightweight ensemble of pretrained CNNs for accurate, real-time plant disease classification on smallholdings.

Findings

Ensemble achieves 99.23% accuracy, reducing error rate significantly.

Individual models reach 96-97% accuracy, ensemble improves performance.

Full pipeline runs at 53 FPS on NVIDIA T4 GPU.

Abstract

Plant disease detection is still largely manual in Bangladesh, where extension workers eyeball leaf samples across millions of smallholdings. We built AgriMind to automate this: an ensemble of ResNet50, EfficientNet-B0, and DenseNet121 trained on 20,638 PlantVillage images across 15 pepper, potato, and tomato disease classes. Transfer learning with frozen ImageNet backbones and 10 epochs of head-only training keeps the pipeline lightweight. Individual models hit 96--97% on the held-out test set, but averaging their softmax outputs pushes the ensemble to 99.23% -- a two-thirds cut in error rate. We tried biasing the average toward the best validation model; it backfired. Dropping any single model also hurt. Pepper and potato classify perfectly; tomato, with ten visually similar classes, still reaches 99.01%. On an NVIDIA T4 GPU the full ensemble runs at 53 FPS. Whether that translates to real-time mobile use depends on TensorFlow Lite optimization -- work we have not yet completed.