GreenAid: a confidence-weighted ensemble deep learning system for real-time plant disease detection and management

Abstract

Plant diseases cause 20-40% annual crop losses worldwide, yet conventional detection methods remain slow, subjective, and inaccessible to smallholder farmers. This work presents GreenAid, an end-to-end plant disease detection and management system that bridges the gap between laboratory-level deep learning performance and practical agricultural deployment. The system integrates a confidence-weighted ensemble of three CNN architectures (VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3), fused through per-class F1-score reliability weights, with a cross-platform mobile application supporting offline inference via TensorFlow Lite, a web-based analytics dashboard, and an NLP-powered chatbot. On the PlantVillage benchmark (87,000 images, 38 classes, 14 species), the ensemble achieves 98.74% accuracy and 98.48% F1-score. Systematic comparison of six fusion strategies confirms that per-class F1 weighting outperforms alternatives including majority voting, simple averaging, and stacking. The INT8-quantised deployment model (78 MB, 127 ms on a mid-range smartphone) retains 98.43% accuracy with per-class analysis confirming disproportionate impact on the five most challenging categories. All pairwise model comparisons are validated by McNemar's test ([Formula: see text]). The primary contribution is the complete, reproducible integration of competitive classification, edge deployment, and an end-to-end agricultural delivery pipeline (mobile application, web dashboard, and NLP chatbot) rather than the ensemble mechanism itself.