Abstract:

Artificial intelligence and deep learning models are utilised in health, IT, animal and plant research, and more. Maize, one of the most widely eaten crops globally, is susceptible to a wide variety of disease that impede its development and reduce its output. The objective of this research work is to develop a deep learning-based model for detection of illnesses affecting maize leaves. Furthermore, the model that has been constructed not only forecasts illness but also furnishes illustrative visuals of leaf diseases, so facilitating the identification of disease types. To do this, a dataset including specified illnesses, including blight, common rust, gray leaf spot, and a healthy leaf, was obtained from Kaggle, a secondary source (Pant village). For data analysis, the cross-platform Anaconda Navigator was used, while the programming languages Python and Jupiter Notebook were implemented. The acquired data was used for both training and evaluating the models. The study presents a novel approach to plant disease detection using the YOLO deep learning model, implemented in Python and associated libraries. The Yolov8 algorithm was employed to develop a maize leaf detection system, which outperformed algorithms such as CNN (84%), KNN (81%), Random Forest (85%), and SVM (82%), achieving an impressive accuracy of 99.8%. Limitations of the study include the focus on only three maize leaf diseases and the reliance on single-leaf images for detection. Future research should address environmental elements like temperature and humidity, include numerous leaves in a frame for disease identification, and create disease stage detection methods. Keyword: Yolov8, Maize Leaf Detection, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Model.