Quantum Behaved Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Deep Transfer Learning Model for Sugarcane Leaf Disease Detection and Classification

Plant diseases pose a major challenge in the agricultural sector, which affects plant development and crop productivity. Sugarcane farming is a highly organized part of farming. Owing to the desirable condition for sugarcane cultivation, India stands among the second largest producers of sugarcane over the globe. At the same time, sugarcane gets easily affected by multifarious diseases which significantly influence crop productivity. The recently developed computer vision (CV) and deep learning (DL) models with an effective design can be employed for the detection and classification of diseases in sugarcane plant. The disease detection in sugarcane plant is not accurate in the existing techniques. This paper presents a quantum behaved particle swarm optimization based deep transfer learning (QBPSO-DTL) model for sugarcane leaf disease detection and classification which produces high accuracy. The proposed QBPSO-DTL method is designed and trained for the prediction of diseased leaf images. The proposed QBPSO-DTL technique encompasses the design of optimal region growing segmentation to determine the affected regions in the leaf image. In addition, the SqueezeNet model is employed as a feature extractor and the deep stacked autoencoder (DSAE) model is applied as a classification model. Finally, the hyperparameter tuning of the DSAE model is carried out by using the QBPSO algorithm. For demonstrating the enhanced outcomes of the QBPSO-DTL approach, a wide range of experiments were implemented and the results ensured the improvements of the QBPSO-DTL model.