Arjun Kannan

Pandiyaraju V, Shravan Venkatraman, Abeshek A et al.

Farmers face various challenges when it comes to identifying diseases in rice leaves during their early stages of growth, which is a major reason for poor produce. Therefore, early and accurate disease identification is important in agriculture to avoid crop loss and improve cultivation. In this research, we propose a novel hybrid deep learning (DL) classifier designed by extending the Squeeze-and-Excitation network architecture with a channel attention mechanism and the Swish ReLU activation function. The channel attention mechanism in our proposed model identifies the most important feature channels required for classification during feature extraction and selection. The dying ReLU problem is mitigated by utilizing the Swish ReLU activation function, and the Squeeze-andExcitation blocks improve information propagation and cross-channel interaction. Upon evaluation, our model achieved a high F1-score of 99.76% and an accuracy of 99.74%, surpassing the performance of existing models. These outcomes demonstrate the potential of state-of-the-art DL techniques in agriculture, contributing to the advancement of more efficient and reliable disease detection systems.

Santhosh Malarvannan, Pandiyaraju V, Shravan Venkatraman et al.

Diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of blindness around the world and demands precise AI-based diagnostic tools. Traditional loss functions in multi-class classification, such as Categorical Cross-Entropy (CCE), are very common but break down with class imbalance, especially in cases with inherently challenging or overlapping classes, which leads to biased and less sensitive models. Since a heavy imbalance exists in the number of examples for higher severity stage 4 diabetic retinopathy, etc., classes compared to those very early stages like class 0, achieving class balance is key. For this purpose, we propose the Adaptive Hybrid Focal-Entropy Loss which combines the ideas of focal loss and entropy loss with adaptive weighting in order to focus on minority classes and highlight the challenging samples. The state-of-the art models applied for diabetic retinopathy detection with AHFE revealed good performance improvements, indicating the top performances of ResNet50 at 99.79%, DenseNet121 at 98.86%, Xception at 98.92%, MobileNetV2 at 97.84%, and InceptionV3 at 93.62% accuracy. This sheds light into how AHFE promotes enhancement in AI-driven diagnostics for complex and imbalanced medical datasets.