A Lightweight Maize Leaf Disease Recognition Using PCA-Compressed MobileNetV2 Features and RBF-SVM
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62411/jcta.15675Keywords:
Deep feature extraction, Fog/Edge Computing, Lightweight model, Maize leaf disease recognition, MobileNetV2, Plant disease classification, Precision agriculture, Smart agricultureAbstract
The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into precision agriculture has significantly improved plant disease recognition; however, many existing deep learning models remain computationally expensive and feature-redundant, limiting their deployment on low-power and edge devices. To address these limitations, this study proposes a lightweight framework for maize leaf disease recognition based on serial deep feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, and machine-learning–based classification. A pre-trained MobileNetV2 network is employed as a fixed feature extractor to obtain discriminative visual representations, while Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to reduce feature dimensionality by approximately 76%, retaining 95% of the original variance and improving computational efficiency. The compressed features are subsequently classified using a Radial Basis Function Support Vector Machine (RBF-SVM), optimized via grid search and cross-validation. Experiments conducted on a four-class maize leaf disease dataset (Northern Leaf Blight, Common Rust, Gray Leaf Spot, and Healthy), with class imbalance handled during training, demonstrate that the proposed MobileNetV2–PCA–SVM pipeline achieves 97.58% accuracy, 96.60% precision, 96.59% recall, and 96.59% F1-score, outperforming the DenseNet201 + Bayesian-optimized SVM baseline (94.60%, 94.40%, 94.40%, and 94.40%, respectively). This improvement corresponds to a 2.98% accuracy gain, a 55% reduction in error rate, an 86% reduction in model parameters (20.31M to 2.75M), and an 85% reduction in model size (81 MB to 12 MB). These results indicate that the proposed framework provides a compact and efficient solution with strong potential for deployment in resource-constrained agricultural environments.References
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