Abstract
Fruit is an essential element of human life and a significant gain for the agriculture sector. Guava is a common fruit found in different countries. It is considered the fourth primary fruit in Pakistan. Several bacterial and fungal diseases found in guava fruit decrease production daily. Leaf Blight is a common disease found in guava fruit that affects the growth and production of fruit. Automatic detection of leaf blight disease in guava fruit can help avoid decreases in its production. In this research, we proposed a CNN-based deep model named SidNet. The proposed model contains thirty-three layers. We used a guava dataset for early recognition of leaf blight, which consists of two classes. Initially, the YCbCr color space was employed as a preprocessing step in detecting leaf blight. As the original dataset was small, data augmentation was performed. DarkNet-53, AlexNet, and the proposed SidNet were used for feature acquisition. The features were fused to get the best-desired results. Binary Gray Wolf Optimization (BGWO) was used on the fused features for feature selection. The optimized features were given to the variants of SVM and KNN classifiers for classification. The experiments were performed on 5- and 10-fold cross validation. The highest achievable outcomes were 98.9% with 5-fold and 99.2% with 10-fold cross validation, confirming the evidence that the identification of Leaf Blight is accurate, successful, and efficient.