Abstract
Sustainable agriculture is an approach that involves adopting and developing agricultural practices to increase efficiency and preserve resources, both environmentally and economically. Jute is one of the primary sources of income grown in many countries. At this stage, increasing efficiency in jute production and protecting it from pests is essential. Detecting jute pests at an early stage will not only improve crop yield but also provide more income. In this paper, an artificial intelligence-based model was suggested to detect jute pests at an early stage. In this developed model, two different pre-trained models were used for feature extraction. To improve the performance of the developed model, the features obtained using the DarkNet-53 and DenseNet-201 models were combined. After this stage, the metaheuristic Mountain Gazelle Optimizer (MGO) was used, allowing the developed model to work faster and achieve more successful results. Feature selection was carried out using MGO; thus, more successful results were obtained with fewer, more compelling features. The proposed model was compared with six different models and five different classifiers accepted in the literature. In the developed model, 17 different jute pests were detected with 96.779% accuracy. The accuracy value achieved in the developed model is promising in successfully detecting jute pests.