Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Cassava is one of the most widely cultivated crops worldwide, renowned for its rich natural ingredients and numerous nutritional benefits. However, the complex interdependencies among its features often pose challenges in image restoration and segmentation, particularly when identifying disease regions. In previous work, this manifested as higher false positives and misidentification of non-relevant areas, leading to a decline in precision and accuracy. METHODS: To address these issues, this study proposed an efficient artificial intelligence-powered image analysis system that leverages optimal feature selection with a HyperCapsInception-ResNet-V2-CNN model to enhance disease detection accuracy. Initially, the dataset was collected from the Kaggle repository, its name was Cassava Leaf Disease Classification, and it comprised 21,367 different images. Our approach began by normalizing cassava plant disease data using adaptive Gaussian Otsu thresholding. Histogram color evaluation and iterative clustering fragmentation were then applied to better isolate disease variations and improve precision. Subsequently, Cascaded Canny Edge Segmentation (CCES) was used to effectively segment the disease region. The disease variation properties were further evaluated using the Optimal Spider Swarm Intelligence Technique (OSSIT) to reduce irrelevant feature dimensions. For classification, the HyperCapsInception-ResNet-V2-CNN model was employed to categorize cassava diseases, including cassava bacterial blight (CBB), cassava mosaic disease (CMD), cassava green mite (CGM) disease, and cassava brown streak disease (CBSD), along with regular and abnormal leaf states. RESULTS: The proposed method's simulation results achieved 98.15% accuracy, a 97.22% F1-score, and 96.02% precision, outperforming other traditional methods such as EfficientNetB3, AlexNet, Faster-RCNN, and InceptionV3. DISCUSSION: Both optimized feature selection with OSSIT and hybrid HyperCapsInception-ResNet-V2-CNN architecture significantly enhanced the detection reluctance and the classification of the data. These findings indicate that the proposed system is effective in the automated detection of cassava disease and has a high potential of being practical in agricultural practices especially in precision farming and early detection of diseases.