International Journal of Neutrosophic Science

Journal DOI

https://doi.org/10.54216/IJNS

Submit Your Paper

2690-6805ISSN (Online) 2692-6148ISSN (Print)

Volume 26 , Issue 2 , PP: 132-152, 2025 | Cite this article as | XML | Html | PDF | Full Length Article

Robust Plant Disease Recognition Using a Neutrosophic-Enhanced, RBF-Based Stacked Ensemble of ConvNeXt and Classical CNN Models

Emre Özbilge 1 * , Ebru Ozbilge 2

  • 1 Department of Computer Engineering, Cyprus International University, Nicosia, North Cyprus, Turkey - (eozbilge@ciu.edu.tr)
  • 2 College of Business Administration, American University of the Middle East, Kuwait - (ebru.kahveci@aum.edu.kw)
  • Doi: https://doi.org/10.54216/IJNS.260210

    Received: December 13, 2024 Revised: February 14, 2025 Accepted: March 13, 2025
    Abstract

    Accurate and timely recognition of plant diseases is crucial to prevent crop loss and ensure global food security. This paper presents a robust ensemble-based framework that combines six classical and state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), including a ConvNeXt architecture, and integrates Neutrosophic Science to better handle uncertainty in leaf images. The proposed approach features three main components: (1) transfer learning with pre-trained DCNNs, (2) a model-averaging strategy to stabilise individual predictions, and (3) a stacked ensemble design that employs a radial basis function (RBF) meta-learner to refine the classification outputs. Experiments on the Plant Village dataset, comprising 54,305 segmented images of 38 plant diseases, included 10-fold cross-validation. The results show that the final stacking ensemble achieved near-perfect performance with 99.97% accuracy and an F1 score of 99.55% on an unseen test set of 27,160 images. Compared with standalone models, the ensemble demonstrated greater robustness in distinguishing visually similar diseases, benefiting from the complementary strengths of multiple DCNN architectures. The Neutrosophic component further enhances reliability by modelling uncertainties due to noise, occlusions, and environmental variations. Although a higher computational overhead and modest misclassifications remain, especially in certain visually overlapping classes, this study demonstrates the effectiveness of an ensembledriven, uncertainty-aware strategy. These findings hold considerable promise for real-world agricultural applications, where rapid and accurate disease diagnosis is paramount.

    Keywords :

    Plant disease classification , Deep learning , Computer vision , Transfer learning , Ensemble learning , Neutrosophic image

    References

    [1] K. Seetharaman, “Real-time automatic detection and classification of groundnut leaf disease using hybrid machine learning techniques,” Multimedia Tools and Applications, vol. 82, no. 2, pp. 1935–1963, 2023.

    [2] Z. Chen, R. Wu, Y. Lin, C. Li, S. Chen, Z. Yuan, S. Chen, and X. Zou, “Plant disease recognition model based on improved yolov5,” Agronomy, vol. 12, no. 2, p. 365, 2022.

    [3] I. Nanda, S. Chadalavada, M. Swathi, and L. Khatua, “Implementation of iiot based smart crop protection and irrigation system,” in Journal of Physics: Conference Series, vol. 1804, p. 012206, IOP Publishing, 2021.

    [4] R. Thangaraj, S. Anandamurugan, P. Pandiyan, and V. K. Kaliappan, “Artificial intelligence in tomato leaf disease detection: a comprehensive review and discussion,” Journal of Plant Diseases and Protection, vol. 129, no. 3, pp. 469–488, 2022.

    [5] S. R. Reddy, G. S. Varma, and R. L. Davuluri, “Resnet-based modified red deer optimization with dlcnn classifier for plant disease identification and classification,” Computers and Electrical Engineering, vol. 105, p. 108492, 2023.

    [6] G. Liu, J. Peng, and A. A. A. El-Latif, “Sk-mobilenet: A lightweight adaptive network based on complex deep transfer learning for plant disease recognition,” Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 1661–1675, 2023.

    [7] P. S. Thakur, T. Sheorey, and A. Ojha, “Vgg-icnn: A lightweight cnn model for crop disease identification,” Multimedia Tools and Applications, vol. 82, no. 1, pp. 497–520, 2023.

    [8] C. Bi, J. Wang, Y. Duan, B. Fu, J.-R. Kang, and Y. Shi, “Mobilenet based apple leaf diseases identification,” Mobile Networks and Applications, pp. 1–9, 2022.

    [9] E. O¨ zbilge, M. K. Uluko¨k, O¨ . Toygar, and E. Ozbilge, “Tomato disease recognition using a compact convolutional neural network,” IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 77213–77224, 2022.

    [10] A. S. Keceli, A. Kaya, C. Catal, and B. Tekinerdogan, “Deep learning-based multi-task prediction system for plant disease and species detection,” Ecological Informatics, vol. 69, p. 101679, 2022.

    [11] G. Geetharamani and A. Pandian, “Identification of plant leaf diseases using a nine-layer deep convolutional neural network,” Computers & Electrical Engineering, vol. 76, pp. 323–338, 2019.

    [12] S. Yu, L. Xie, and Q. Huang, “Inception convolutional vision transformers for plant disease identification,” Internet of Things, vol. 21, p. 100650, 2023.

    [13] W. Albattah, M. Nawaz, A. Javed, M. Masood, and S. Albahli, “A novel deep learning method for detection and classification of plant diseases,” Complex & Intelligent Systems, pp. 1–18, 2022.

    [14] X. Fan, P. Luo, Y. Mu, R. Zhou, T. Tjahjadi, and Y. Ren, “Leaf image based plant disease identification using transfer learning and feature fusion,” Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, vol. 196, p. 106892, 2022.

    [15] O. Attallah, “Tomato leaf disease classification via compact convolutional neural networks with transfer learning and feature selection,” Horticulturae, vol. 9, no. 2, p. 149, 2023.

    [16] A. Nayak, S. Chakraborty, and D. K. Swain, “Application of smartphone-image processing and transfer learning for rice disease and nutrient deficiency detection,” Smart Agricultural Technology, p. 100195, 2023.

    [17] F. Smarandache, “Neutrosophy: neutrosophic probability, set, and logic: analytic synthesis synthetic analysis,” American Research Press, 1998.

    [18] K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun, “Identity mappings in deep residual networks,” 2016.

    [19] C. Szegedy, V. Vanhoucke, S. Ioffe, J. Shlens, and Z. Wojna, “Rethinking the inception architecture for computer vision,” 2015.

    [20] G. Huang, Z. Liu, L. van der Maaten, and K. Q. Weinberger, “Densely connected convolutional networks,” 2016.

    [21] K. Simonyan and A. Zisserman, “Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition,” 2014.

    [22] A. Howard, M. Sandler, G. Chu, L.-C. Chen, B. Chen, M. Tan, W.Wang, Y. Zhu, R. Pang, V. Vasudevan, Q. V. Le, and H. Adam, “Searching for mobilenetv3,” 2019.

    [23] Z. Liu, H. Mao, C.-Y. Wu, C. Feichtenhofer, T. Darrell, and S. Xie, “A convnet for the 2020s,” 2022.

    [24] A. G. Howard, M. Zhu, B. Chen, D. Kalenichenko, W. Wang, T. Weyand, M. Andreetto, and H. Adam, “Mobilenets: Efficient convolutional neural networks for mobile vision applications,” 2017.

    [25] M. Sandler, A. Howard, M. Zhu, A. Zhmoginov, and L.-C. Chen, “Mobilenetv2: Inverted residuals and linear bottlenecks,” 2018.

    [26] A. Krizhevsky, I. Sutskever, and G. E. Hinton, “Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks,” Communications of the ACM, vol. 60, no. 6, pp. 84–90, 2017.

    [27] K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun, “Deep residual learning for image recognition,” 2015.

    [28] Z. Zhang, S. Qiao, C. Peng, X. Li, and J. Yan, ”VarifocalNet: An IoU-aware dense object detector,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 8514-8523.

    [29] A. Sengur, and Y. Guo, “Color texture image segmentation based on neutrosophic set and wavelet transformation,” Computer Vision and Image Understanding, vol. 115, no. 8, pp. 1134-1144, 2021.

    [30] N.E.M. Khalifa, F. Smarandache, G. Manogaran, and M. Loey, “A study of the neutrosophic set significance on deep transfer learning models: An experimental case on a limited covid-19 chest x-ray dataset,” Cognitive Computation, pp. 1-10, 2021.

     

    Cite This Article As :
    Özbilge, Emre. , Ozbilge, Ebru. Robust Plant Disease Recognition Using a Neutrosophic-Enhanced, RBF-Based Stacked Ensemble of ConvNeXt and Classical CNN Models. International Journal of Neutrosophic Science, vol. , no. , 2025, pp. 132-152. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54216/IJNS.260210
    Özbilge, E. Ozbilge, E. (2025). Robust Plant Disease Recognition Using a Neutrosophic-Enhanced, RBF-Based Stacked Ensemble of ConvNeXt and Classical CNN Models. International Journal of Neutrosophic Science, (), 132-152. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54216/IJNS.260210
    Özbilge, Emre. Ozbilge, Ebru. Robust Plant Disease Recognition Using a Neutrosophic-Enhanced, RBF-Based Stacked Ensemble of ConvNeXt and Classical CNN Models. International Journal of Neutrosophic Science , no. (2025): 132-152. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54216/IJNS.260210
    Özbilge, E. , Ozbilge, E. (2025) . Robust Plant Disease Recognition Using a Neutrosophic-Enhanced, RBF-Based Stacked Ensemble of ConvNeXt and Classical CNN Models. International Journal of Neutrosophic Science , () , 132-152 . DOI: https://doi.org/10.54216/IJNS.260210
    Özbilge E. , Ozbilge E. [2025]. Robust Plant Disease Recognition Using a Neutrosophic-Enhanced, RBF-Based Stacked Ensemble of ConvNeXt and Classical CNN Models. International Journal of Neutrosophic Science. (): 132-152. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54216/IJNS.260210
    Özbilge, E. Ozbilge, E. "Robust Plant Disease Recognition Using a Neutrosophic-Enhanced, RBF-Based Stacked Ensemble of ConvNeXt and Classical CNN Models," International Journal of Neutrosophic Science, vol. , no. , pp. 132-152, 2025. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54216/IJNS.260210