PlantNet-Lite: A Lightweight CNN Approach for Plant Disease Recognition

Plant diseases like rust and powdery mildew pose serious risks to agriculture worldwide and can have a devastating effect on harvests if they are not identified in time. While powdery mildew damages plants with white or gray powder-like spots, rust causes pustules on leaves and stems that hinder photosynthetic activity. These illnesses have the potential to spread quickly, resulting in large crop losses, upsetting food supply systems, and hurting farmers' bottom lines. Recent developments in deep learning have made it possible to automatically diagnose diseases using pretrained models such as VGG19 and MobileNetV2, which are crucial for early identification. Nevertheless, these models frequently necessitate significant computational resources, rendering them unsuitable for implementation in settings with limited resources. A lightweight convolutional…