Abstract
The difficulty of collecting maize leaf lesion characteristics in an environment that undergoes frequent changes, suffers varying illumination from lighting sources, and is influenced by a variety of other factors makes detecting diseases in maize leaves difficult. It is critical to monitor and identify plant leaf diseases during the initial growing period to take suitable preventative measures. In this work, we propose an automated maize leaf disease recognition system constructed using the PRF-SVM model. The PRFSVM model was constructed by combining three powerful components: PSPNet, ResNet50, and Fuzzy Support Vector Machine (Fuzzy SVM). The combination of PSPNet and ResNet50 not only assures that the model can capture delicate visual features but also allows for end-to-end training for smooth integration. Fuzzy SVM is included as a final classification layer to accommodate the inherent fuzziness and uncertainty in real-world image data. Five different maize crop diseases (common rust, southern rust, grey leaf spot, maydis leaf blight, and turcicum leaf blight along with healthy leaves) are selected from the Plant Village dataset for the algorithm's evaluation. The average accuracy achieved using the proposed method is approximately 96.67%. The PRFSVM model achieves an average accuracy rating of 96.67% and a mAP value of 0.81, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach for detecting and classifying various forms of maize leaf diseases.