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AgriMind: An Ensemble Deep Learning Framework for Multi-Class Plant Disease Classification

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-05-18 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Plant disease detection is still largely manual in Bangladesh, where extension workers eyeball leaf samples across millions of smallholdings. We built AgriMind to automate this: an ensemble of ResNet50, EfficientNet-B0, and DenseNet121 trained on 20,638 PlantVillage images across 15 pepper, potato, and tomato disease classes. Transfer learning with frozen ImageNet backbones and 10 epochs of head-only training keeps the pipeline lightweight. Individual models hit 96--97% on the held-out test set, but averaging their softmax outputs pushes the ensemble to 99.23% -- a two-thirds cut in error rate. We tried biasing the average toward the best validation model; it backfired. Dropping any single model also hurt. Pepper and potato classify perfectly; tomato, with ten visually similar classes, still reaches 99.01%. On an NVIDIA T4 GPU the full ensemble runs at 53 FPS. Whether that translates to real-time mobile use depends on TensorFlow Lite optimization -- work we have not yet completed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.16076,
  title  = {AgriMind: An Ensemble Deep Learning Framework for Multi-Class Plant Disease Classification},
  author = {Salma Hoque Talukdar Koli and Fahima Haque Talukder Jely},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.16076},
  year   = {2026}
}