Abstract
The potato plant is amongst the most significant vegetable crops farmed worldwide. The output of potato crop production is significantly reduced by various leaf diseases, which poses a danger to the world's agricultural production in terms of both volume and quality. The two most destructive foliar infections for potato plants are early and late blight triggered by Alternaria solani and Phytophthora infestans. In actuality, farm owners predict these problems by focusing primarily on the alteration in the color of the potato leaves, which is typically problematic owing to uncertainty and significant time commitment. In these circumstances, it is vital to develop computer-aided techniques that automatically identify these disorders quickly and reliably, even in their early stages. This paper aims to provide an effective solution to recognize the various types of potato diseases by presenting a deep learning (DL) approach called EfficientPNet. More specifically, we introduce an end-to-end training-oriented approach by using the EfficientNet-V2 network to recognize various potato leaf disorders. A spatial-channel attention method is introduced to concentrate on the damaged areas and enhance the approach's recognition ability to effectively identify numerous infections. To address the problem of class-imbalanced samples and to improve network generalization ability, the EANet model is tuned using transfer learning, and dense layers are added at the end of the model structure to enhance the feature selection power of the model. The model is tested on an open and challenging dataset called PlantVillage, containing images taken in diverse and complicated background conditions, including various lightning conditions and the different color changes in leaves. The model obtains an accuracy of 98.12% on the task of classifying various potato plant leaf diseases such as late blight, early blight, and healthy leaves in 10,800 images. We have confirmed through the performed experiments that our approach is effective for potato plant leaf disease classification and can robustly tackle distorted samples. Hence, farmers can save money and harvest by using the EfficientPNet tool.