A nation’s economy’s growth and improvement are greatly influenced by agriculture. It is the main source of the world economy. Agricultural research aims to increase food quality and production while decreasing costs and improving profitability [1]. Any state’s economic development depends on its fruit trees. The citrus tree is one of the most identifiable fruit species of plants. It is rich in vitamin C and popular throughout the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent [2]. Citrus plants provide several health advantages, and the agricultural industry uses them as raw goods to create various other agro-based products, such as sweets, jams, ice cream, and confectionery, among others [2,3]. The most significant fruit plant in Pakistan is citrus, which contributes significantly to the nation’s horticultural exports. In 2018, Pakistan produced an estimated 2.5 million tons of citrus annually. Conversely, citrus plants are prone to some diseases, including melanose, black spots, cankers, scabs, and greening. Citrus trees can get the canker, primarily located on the leaves or fruit, and it is extremely contagious. According to statistics, crop losses in Kinnow were about 22%, in sweet oranges 25%–40%, in grease 15%, in sweet limes 10%, and in lemons 2%. Every year, a huge chunk of strong exportation of citrus is discarded due to indications of citrus fruit illnesses. Therefore, early detection of citrus illnesses can save costs and losses while raising the final product’s quality.

For many years, humans have been the main source of disease identification. The recognition and diagnostic processes are prejudicial, prone to mistakes, time-consuming, and expensive. Consequently, there is a critical necessity for a computerized approach to identifying citrus plant diseases. It is now simpler to inspect and robotically identify abnormalities in a plant in actual time because of the advancement of contemporary instruments and fast computer-based assisted processes [4]. Traditional Machine Learning (ML) approaches have been quite effective at detecting and identifying plant diseases, however, they can only handle the sequential image processing techniques: segmenting images with clustering and other approaches [5,6], feature extraction [7], Support Vector Machine (SVM) [8], K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) method [9], and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) [10]. It’s challenging to choose and extract the finest visible pathogenic features, demanding the use of highly skilled experts and professionals, which is ineffective in terms of both human resources and economic support. Instead of manually creating the structural processes of extracting features and classifications, deep learning can automatically recognize the hierarchical characteristics of diseases. The DL techniques are highly effective in a variety of fields, such as signal processing [10], face recognition [11], biomedical image analysis [12], and numerous other techniques. Additionally, deep learning techniques have shown promise in the agricultural sector, assisting more farmers and workers in the food industry, such as in the identification of plant diseases [13], analysis of weeds [14], pest recognition [15], processing of fruits [13], and many more, which made interacting with image processing. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are considered the most successful DL method [16]. To recognize and categorize plant diseases, a number of CNN architectures are used, including AlexNet [17], GoogLeNet [18], and others. In addition, numerous researchers have employed deep learning models to recognize and categorize citrus plant diseases (Pourreza et al. [19], Barman et al. [20], and Zia Ur Rehman et al. [21]).

Research Contributions: The significant contributions this work brings to the field of research are the following:

Different pre-trained models are used to train various models with and without data augmentation.

Following is a chronological breakdown of the article: Section 2 is the body of relevant work. Section 3 describes the suggested methodology and implementation, and Section 4 explained the experimental results. In the last, Section 5 presented the conclusion of the work with future work and recommendations.

There are various applications of digital image processing and deep learning in different applied domains of computer vision [22–24]. Recent research focuses on using deep learning models [25–27]. Researchers have been trying to diagnose leaf and fruit diseases for many years. Computer vision and machine learning researchers have suggested numerous approaches for identifying and classifying plant diseases. Due to its enormous production, the citrus plant is given significant importance in agriculture. To protect citrus from diseases, several techniques for identifying and categorizing citrus diseases have been presented. Golhani et al. [28] have reported various studies on neural network methods used to recognize and categorize plant diseases. Citrus canker and Huanglongbing (HLB) were detected using SVM and a fluorescent imaging system by Wetterich et al. [29]. This method had a classification accuracy of 97.8% for citrus canker and scab and a 95% detection accuracy for HLB and zinc deficiency. A conventional image processing method for identifying and classifying citrus plant diseases is suggested by Sharif et al. [1]. Features are extracted for segmentation using an optimized weighted segmentation approach. Features are selected using entropy and a principle component analysis (PCA) score-based vector after combining texture, shape, and color features. A multi-class SVM takes the final features and classifies them. The suggested method achieved an accuracy of 90.4% on the plant village dataset. There is much space for improvement about classification accuracy. Deep learning has recently acquired prominence in various fields, including image processing, image recognition, classification, and agriculture. Deep learning is a worthy competitor for classifying citrus diseases because it eliminates the time-consuming extraction of features and segmentation based on thresholds. Xing et al. [30] proposed a detection method for pest and citrus plant illness using a weakly thick connected convolutional network. They applied different CNN models on a citrus self-dataset. The network in a network (NIN-16) network scored a test accuracy of 91.66% compared to the Squeezeand-Excitation Network (SENet-16) network, 88.36%. A strong CNN algorithm was proposed by Dhiman [31] as a technique for identifying citrus illnesses. A dense model without data augmentation or image preprocessing techniques is used to test the proposed model. Prediction accuracy using the proposed methodology is 89.1%. Kukreja et al. [32] presented a deep learning approach employing preprocessing and data augmentation to automatically identify and classify citrus illnesses. Their findings showed that the data preprocessing and augmentation techniques increased the dataset’s size and quality, improving classification accuracy. The proposed approach had an overall accuracy of 89.1% on the citrus fruit dataset. Khattak et al. [33] proposed two convolutional layers of a CNN-based leaf disease identification method. Citrus fruit and leaves are classified according to their vulnerability to disease based on the 1st CNN layer, which extracts minimal-level characteristics from the image, and the 2nd CNN layer, which gathers strong-level characteristics. The proposed CNN model beats comparable models by classifying citrus fruit and leaf diseases with an accuracy of 95.65%. MobiNetV2 was trained by Liu et al. [34] to classify and detect six common citrus illnesses. Comparing MobiNetV2 to earlier network models regarding model accuracy, model validation speed, and model size reveals that it is superior in categorizing and identifying citrus diseases. Using Transfer Learning (TL) and feature fusion, Zia Ur Rehman et al. [21] suggested a new method to classify citrus fruit diseases. According to the findings, the individual characteristics of MobiNetV2 and DenseNet201 are less accurate at classifying data than the fusion and optimum set of features produced by the two retrained classifiers. The suggested model performs better than current methodologies, with accuracy of 95.7%. Wetterich et al. [29] analyzed and compared the effectiveness of SGDM optimization techniques for transfer learning-based automated citrus disease recognition. Two common models, AlexNet and VGG19, were investigated for extracting characteristics from the photos. The datasets for citrus fruit and leaf disease were utilized to achieve the highest classification accuracy, which was 94.3%, which was used to evaluate network performance.

Research gap: Simple ML and DL approaches have been demonstrated to be effective and widely utilized in plant disease prediction; however, most recent studies had difficulties significantly improving classification accuracy rates. Additionally, there is some performance degradation due to the neural network model’s poor parameter and layer selection. Therefore, the proposed architecture employs various pre-trained CNN-based models for classifying citrus plant diseases using transfer learning. Additionally, the network has experimented with various pre-trained CNN models with and without data augmentation and contrasted the results with the underlying research.

This section discusses different methods for classifying a number of citrus plant diseases. The classification methods are based on deep learning and conventional image processing. Deep learning approaches have gained popularity in recent years since they are less complicated than image processing methods and produce better results in terms of accuracy.

Deep neural networks have been increasingly popular in recent years for autonomous disease detection in citrus plants. This work provides a brief overview of the suggested framework for using DL and image processing in detecting and categorizing diseases in citrus plants. Fig. 1 shows the general scheme of suggested deep learning models, which includes the input dataset stage, image-preprocessing stage, and the deep CNN features extraction stage using transfer learning, the classification stage, and the model performance assessment stage. The given methodology consists of four main modules: (i) Dataset Collection (ii) Data Augmentation and Image pre-processing (iii) Data Splitting (iv) Proposed Architecture.

Each experiment’s findings are discussed in this section. The CNN-based InceptionV3, ResNet50, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetB3 architectural models were used in experiments using training and validation data. Table 3 shows the accuracy and loss of training and validation data for each pre-trained CNN-based model.

Experiments show that EfficientNetB3 outperforms all CNN based models in terms of performance, with a training accuracy of 99.43%. ResNet50 model ranked second with an accuracy of 98.39%, followed by MobileNetV2 with an accuracy of 97.93%, and InceptionV3 with an accuracy of 96.39%.

Table 2 also shows the training loss for every learned CNN model. With a value of 0.021, EfficientNetB3 is the architecture with the lowest training loss, followed by ResNet50, MobileNetV2, and InceptionV3 with values of 0.048, 0.060, and 0.109, respectively. The accuracy and loss curves achieved during the learning phase are shown below in Figs. 10–13.

The performance evaluation matrix between the trained network and the test dataset is shown in Table 4, along with the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-Score for each model calculated by following equations.

(1)Accuracy=TP+TN/(TP+TN+FP+FN)

(2)Precision=TP/(TP+FP)

(3)Recall=TP/(TP+FN)

(4)F1−Score=(2∗Precision∗Recall)/(Precision+Recall)where TP = True Positive, TN = True Negative, FP = False Positive, and FN = False Negative. The test results showed that EfficientNetB3 performed better than all CNN architecture models in regards to accuracy (99.58%), precision (100%), recall (100%), and F1-Score (100%). The ResNet50 architecture came in second with accuracy values of 98.74, precision of 96.00%, recall of 95.00%, and F1-score of 96.00%. Accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-Score for InceptionV2 are all 96.23%, 97.00%, and 97.00%, respectively, whereas MobileNet receives accuracy values of 97.91%, precision 97.00%, recall 98.00%, and F1-Score 99.00%.

The confusion matrix with data testing for the EfficientNetB3 architectural model is shown in Fig. 14. As illustrated in Fig. 14, no data from the sample tested were incorrectly classified. Table 4 illustrates the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 Score values. Fig. 15 shows the confusion matrix on testing data for the ResNet50 architecture. There are 2 sample data that are incorrectly classified out of the 32 sample data tested. A sample of two Greening class data points were incorrectly classified. Fig. 16 displays the confusion matrix for the MobileNet architecture model on testing data. One sample of the 32 tested data were incorrectly categorized. One sample of incorrectly classified Greening class data. The confusion matrix with data testing for the InceptionV3 architectural model is shown in Fig. 17. One sample data is incorrectly categorized out of the 32 sample data analyzed.

Fig. 18 compares the testing accuracy and loss of the EfficientNetB3, MobiNetV3, ResNet50, and InceptionV3 models on the augmented and non-augmented dataset. Fig. 18 shows that EfficientNetB3 gives the highest performance, with 99.58% testing accuracy and 0.021% loss, which is maximal compared to other models. With an accuracy of 99.58%, Fig. 18 also demonstrates that the model created using EfficientNetB3 is the most accurate for detecting and categorizing citrus plant diseases. Additionally, the proposed approach is compared with current methods for the classification and diagnosis of diseases affecting citrus plants, as illustrated in Table 5. Based on classification accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score the suggested technique outperforms the existing techniques.

To increase citrus plant productivity, it is critical to identify and classify citrus plant diseases in a timely, effective, quick, automated, less expensive, and precise manner. Deep learning and CNNs have successfully addressed many fundamental issues associated with classifying plant diseases. Transfer learning techniques are quite effective for identifying and classifying plant diseases. This study used the most recent transfer learning-based models on the Citrus Plant Dataset to improve classification accuracy. This study successfully proposed a deep transfer learning-based pre-trained CNN model (EfficientNetB3, ResNet50, MobiNetV2, GoogleNet (InceptionV3)) for citrus plant disease recognition and classification. The existing model distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy citrus plant diseases. To assess network performance, the researchers discovered that transferring an EfficientNetb3 model previously trained on an ImageNet database effectively creates a deep neural network model for the early diagnosis and classification of citrus plant diseases. The proposed model obtained the highest training, validating, and testing accuracies with the transfer of an EfficientNetb3 model, which was 99.43%, 99.48%, and 99.58%, respectively. In addition, the proposed model is compared to other methods for the automated diagnosis and classification of citrus plant diseases. The results show that the recommended CNN model outperforms recent modern CNN techniques developed in previous research for citrus plant disease detection and recognition.

Future Work and Recommendations: The main challenge with this study is a lack of available data, which is mitigated somewhat by including a data augmentation phase. Other data augmentation methods, more training, and other pre-trained models could help achieve higher accuracy and lower loss in future studies for this dataset. The proposed method is based on data from five citrus diseases. Future research could investigate different citrus datasets to analyze other disease classes. The proposed method is based on four pre-trained CNN-based models; no other deep-learning models were used. Other deep learning models can also be used to improve accuracy and computational efficiency.