A hybrid approach for citrus disease detection using convolutional neural networks and fuzzy inference systems for enhanced accuracy and interpretability

The citrus diseases are affecting the fruit production worldwide thereby posing an economical burden. Major research is moving towards finding solutions using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Image processing methods. Due to factors like illumination variations, leaf form, and disease symptoms, image data has intrinsic uncertainties that are typically difficult for traditional machine learning techniques to handle. In this paper, the interpretability of fuzzy logic is combined with the resilience of deep learning to propose a novel Fuzzy Convolutional Neural Network (Fuzzy-CNN) architecture for the automated diagnosis of citrus leaf diseases. The hybrid method uses a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to obtain complex features of citrus images, and a Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) to improve the classification results. The proposed approach encodes accurate data into fuzzy sets and applies linguistic concepts to determine the severity of a disease, which will contribute to the further development of the decision. In order to test and verify the proposed approach, several experiments were carried out, which proved that Fuzzy-CNN is more effective than regular CNN models with the approximate accuracy difference approximately 1.8, and especially in cases when the symptoms of disease are not clear. To strengthen experimental validation, the proposed method is evaluated on two independent datasets, including an external benchmark dataset, imbalance-aware evaluation metrics are employed to ensure robustness and generalizability. Experimental results demonstrate consistent and statistically significant improvements over existing neuro-fuzzy and machine learning approaches. This research contributes to early detection by collaborating the potential of fuzzy neural networks and offering a flexible solution for real-time disease detection in citrus crops.