# An Efficient Transfer Learning-based Approach for Apple Leaf Disease Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06520 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06520/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Using Deep Learning for Image-Based Plant Disease Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03169/) (2016)
- [Deep learning in agriculture: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11809/) (2018)
- [An open access repository of images on plant health to enable the development of mobile disease diagnostics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08060/) (2015)
- [Less is More: Lighter and Faster Deep Neural Architecture for Tomato Leaf Disease Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02394/) (2021)
- [Two Decades of Bengali Handwritten Digit Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02234/) (2022)
- [Fruit Quality Assessment with Densely Connected Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04255/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Cooking State Recognition with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08586/) (2022)
- [Densely-Populated Traffic Detection using YOLOv5 and Non-Maximum Suppression Ensembling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12118/) (2021)
- [Performance Analysis of YOLO-based Architectures for Vehicle Detection from Traffic Images in Bangladesh](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09144/) (2022)
- [Huruf: An Application for Arabic Handwritten Character Recognition Using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08610/) (2022)
- [HEATGait: Hop-Extracted Adjacency Technique in Graph Convolution based Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10238/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [AQUA20: A Benchmark Dataset for Underwater Species Classification under Challenging Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17455/) (2025)
- [MangoLeafViT: Leveraging Lightweight Vision Transformer with Runtime Augmentation for Efficient Mango Leaf Disease Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23961/) (2025)
- [DExNet: Combining Observations of Domain Adapted Critics for Leaf Disease Classification with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18173/) (2025)
- [SpectroFusion-ViT: A Lightweight Transformer for Speech Emotion Recognition Using Harmonic Mel-Chroma Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00746/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Correct identification and categorization of plant diseases are crucial for ensuring the safety of the global food supply and the overall financial success of stakeholders. In this regard, a wide range of solutions has been made available by introducing deep learning-based classification systems for different staple crops. Despite being one of the most important commercial crops in many parts of the globe, research proposing a smart solution for automatically classifying apple leaf diseases remains relatively unexplored. This study presents a technique for identifying apple leaf diseases based on transfer learning. The system extracts features using a pretrained EfficientNetV2S architecture and passes to a classifier block for effective prediction. The class imbalance issues are tackled by utilizing runtime data augmentation. The effect of various hyperparameters, such as input resolution, learning rate, number of epochs, etc., has been investigated carefully. The competence of the proposed pipeline has been evaluated on the apple leaf disease subset from the publicly available `PlantVillage' dataset, where it achieved an accuracy of 99.21%, outperforming the existing works.