Hybrid multimodal learning framework for crop disease detection, adaptive treatment, and price forecasting

Crop diseases play a significant role in food production globally; therefore, there is an urgent need to develop quick and accurate diagnostic techniques that are more effective than manual inspection methods. The proposed hybrid multimodal learning framework in this research provides a solution that integrates adaptive therapy suggestion, market price prediction, and image-based disease detection. This study also proposes a framework for pesticide recommendation and the treatment of plants. This study experiment on tomato and cotton crop leaf data for disease detection. Experimental results on a tomato crop disease detection dataset show that the proposed model shows high performance. EfficientNetB0 provides more stability and generalization capabilities in different scenarios compared to other models, such as YOLOv8, ResNet50, and a custom CNN model. The use of a knowledge-based decision support system provides sustainable pesticide recommendations based on environmental and symptom-specific parameters. Forecasting of pesticide prices through LSTM methods yields forecasts within 3.2% and 4.1% MAE, enabling improved decision-making by providing instant points of reference for potential price movements. Research uses SHAP and LIME to provide explainability to users, thus improving user buy-in through transparency. Overall, this modular system provides a data-driven decision-making model to improve the efficiency of managing crops.