Classification of Multi-Crop Leaf Diseases in Rice, Wheat, and Bean Using a Deep Transfer Learning Approach

Abstract

In Bangladesh, crop leaf diseases create a serious risk to food security and production from agriculture. Timely identification of leaf diseases in rice, wheat, and bean crops is considered crucial for the implementation of effective disease detection and classification strategies. To address this challenge, a MobilenetV2-based disease identification and classification system is proposed in this research. Previous studies focus on classifying diseases of a single species, leaving the need to train models separately for each species. This research focuses on forming a single standard model to perform leaf disease classification for multiple crop species including rice, wheat, and beans. The approach makes use of transfer learning with the MobilenetV2 model, which is fine-tuned using a dataset of annotated crop leaf images specific to Bangladesh. Following a comprehensive evaluation, an overall accuracy of 97.87% was achieved in the classification of crop leaf diseases, which surpasses the accuracy of a number of previous studies focusing on leaf disease detection of a single crop. The system demonstrates the capability to rapidly diagnose diseases in real time by enabling the users to prompt intervention to mitigate potential crop losses, ultimately leading to amplified crop yield and food security. Overall, the research highlights the promise of AI-powered solutions in tackling crop leaf disease detection, which in turn encourages greater research and technology adoption to support sustainable farming methods especially in the crop disease classification domain in Bangladesh and throughout the world. 

Received: 24 May 2025 | Revised: 9 March 2026 | Accepted: 14 April 2026

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Bangladeshi Crops Disease Dataset at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/nafishamoin/bangladeshi-crops-disease-dataset and the Bean Disease Dataset at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/therealoise/bean-disease-dataset. 

Author Contribution Statement

Md. Mahmudul Hasan: Conceptualization, Methodology, Visualization, Supervision. Md. Omar Faruq: Software, Validation, Writing – original draft. Mahadi Hasan Musa: Formal analysis, Investigation. Mohammad Mamunur Rashid: Resources, Data curation, Writing – review & editing. Khandaker Mohammad Mohi Uddin: Writing – review & editing, Project administration, Supervision.