Smart Intercropping System to Detect Leaf Disease using Hyperspectral Imaging and Hybrid Deep Learning for Precision Agriculture

S B Goyal¹Varun Malik²Anand Singh Rajawat³Mudassir Khan⁴Amna Ikram^5,6*Bayan Alabdullah^7*Abrar Almjally⁸

• ¹Mind Intellect Technology Pvt Ltd,Nashik, Maharashtra, India,, Maharashtra, India
• ²Chitkara Institute of Engineering and Technology, Chandigarh, India
• ³Sandip University, Nashik, India
• ⁴King Khalid University, Abha, Saudi Arabia
• ⁵Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, Pakistan
• ⁶The Government Sadiq College Women University Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, Pakistan
• ⁷Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
• ⁸Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

The rapid growth of the global population and intensive agricultural activities has posed serious environmental challenges. In response, there is an increasing demand for sustainable agricultural solutions that ensure efficient resource utilization while maintaining ecological balance. Among these, intercropping has gained prominence as a viable method, promoting enhanced land use efficiency and fostering environment for crop development. However, disease management in intercropping systems remains complex due to the potential for cross-infection and overlapping disease symptoms among crops. Early and precise illness recognition is, therefore, critical for sustaining crop condition and efficiency. This study introduces an intelligent intercropping framework for early leaf disease detection, utilizing hyperspectral imaging and hybrid deep learning models for precision agriculture. Hyperspectral imaging captures intricate biochemical and structural variations in crops like maize, soybean, pea, and cucumber—subtle markers of disease that are otherwise imperceptible. These images enable accurate identification of diseases such as rust, leaf spot, and complex co-infections. To refine disease region segmentation and improve detection accuracy, the proposed model employs the synergistic swarm optimization (SSO) algorithm. A phase attention fusion network (PANet) is utilized for deep feature extraction, minimizing false detection rates. Furthermore, a dual-stage Kepler optimization (DSKO) algorithm addresses the challenge of high-dimensional data by choosing the most applicable landscapes. The disease classification is performed using a random deep convolutional neural network (R-DCNN). Experimental evaluations were conducted using publicly available hyperspectral datasets for maize–soybean and pea– cucumber intercropping systems. The suggestedidealattained remarkable organization accuracies of 99.676% and 99.538% for the respective intercropping systems, demonstrating its potential as a robust, non-invasive tool for smart, sustainable agriculture.