Detection and Classification of Diseases in Multi-Crop Leaves using LSTM and CNN Models
Addressing the challenges of early diagnosis and poor cross-crop generalization in multi-crop leaf disease identification, this study constructs and comparatively evaluates two end-to-end deep learning architectures—CNN and LSTM—using a large-scale dataset of 72,000 leaf images spanning multiple crop species. It presents the first systematic performance assessment of both models on a fine-grained, 38-class multi-crop disease recognition task. Models are trained with data augmentation, the Adam optimizer, and categorical cross-entropy loss. Experimental results show that the CNN achieves a validation accuracy of 96.4%, significantly outperforming the LSTM (93.43%); all key metrics—including F1-score—meet stringent evaluation criteria. This work demonstrates that CNNs exhibit superior fine-grained discriminative capability and cross-crop generalization for plant disease recognition. Moreover, the optimized CNN model is lightweight and robust, exhibiting strong potential for real-world field deployment in precision agriculture applications.