Handling imbalance and few-sample size in ML based Onion disease classification

Accurate classification of pests and diseases plays a vital role in precision agriculture, enabling efficient identification, targeted interventions, and preventing their further spread. However, current methods primarily focus on binary classification, which limits their practical applications, especially in scenarios where accurately identifying the specific type of disease or pest is essential. We propose a robust deep learning based model for multi-class classification of onion crop diseases and pests. We enhance a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model by integrating attention based modules and employing comprehensive data augmentation pipeline to mitigate class imbalance. We propose a model which gives 96.90% overall accuracy and 0.96 F1 score on real-world field image dataset. This model gives better results than other approaches using the same datasets.