CropsDisNet: An AI-Based Platform for Disease Detection and Advancing On-Farm Privacy Solutions

Crop failure is defined as crop production that is significantly lower than anticipated, resulting from plants that are harmed, diseased, destroyed, or influenced by climatic circumstances. With the rise in global food security concern, the earliest detection of crop diseases has proven to be pivotal in agriculture industries to address the needs of the global food crisis and on-farm data protection, which can be met with a privacy-preserving deep learning model. However, deep learning seems to be a largely complex black box to interpret, necessitating a prerequisite for the groundwork of the model’s interpretability. Considering this, the aim of this study was to follow up on the establishment of a robust deep learning custom model named CropsDisNet, evaluated on a large-scale dataset named “New Bangladeshi Crop Disease Dataset (corn, potato and wheat)”, which contains a total of 8946 images. The integration of a differential privacy algorithm into our CropsDisNet model could establish the benefits of automated crop disease classification without compromising on-farm data privacy by reducing training data leakage. To classify corn, potato, and wheat leaf diseases, we used three representative CNN models for image classification (VGG16, Inception Resnet V2, Inception V3) along with our custom model, and the classification accuracy for these three different crops varied from 92.09% to 98.29%. In addition, demonstration of the model’s interpretability gave us insight into our model’s decision making and classification results, which can allow farmers to understand and take appropriate precautions in the event of early widespread harvest failure and food crises.