Corn leaf diseases are one of the biggest challenges undermining crop productivity and ensuring global food security, so early and accurate identification is crucial for proper management of the crop. Although Dense CNN and GoogleNet achieved high accuracies of 98.06% and 98.7%, respectively, the models fail to capture more complex relationships and patterns related to various leaf diseases because they use classical deep learning architectures. But with large datasets, the potential comes only in optimizing feature extraction and classification processes. With this, a need arises to introduce Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNN), where the principle of quantum computing can be utilized to enhance the representation of features for better detection accuracy. The demonstration of our experiments showed that the QCNN achieves a detection accuracy of 99%, superior to both Dense CNN and GoogleNet. Agriculture.
Corn leaf diseases are one of the biggest challenges undermining crop productivity and ensuring global food security, so early and accurate identification is crucial for proper management of the crop. Although Dense CNN and GoogleNet achieved high accuracies of 98.06% and 98.7%, respectively, the models fail to capture more complex relationships and patterns related to various leaf diseases because they use classical deep learning architectures. But with large datasets, the potential comes only in optimizing feature extraction and classification processes. With this, a need arises to introduce Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNN), where the principle of quantum computing can be utilized to enhance the representation of features for better detection accuracy. The demonstration of our experiments showed that the QCNN achieves a detection accuracy of 99%, superior to both Dense CNN and GoogleNet. Agriculture.
Potato leaf diseases pose a serious challenge to agricultural sustainability and food security in regions such as West Bengal, India, where potato cultivation plays a vital socio-economic role. Although classical deep learning models demonstrate strong performance, they often suffer from overfitting, limited generalization, and heavy reliance on large labeled datasets, while manual inspection remains time-consuming and error-prone. This work proposes a hybrid Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) integrated with 4-qubit parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) for accurate classification of five major potato leaf disease categories, including nutrient deficiency, fungal, and viral infections. The model incorporates quantum activation layers, quantum softmax, and a focused loss function to enhance non-linear feature representation and multi-class separability. Grad-CAM is employed to improve the interpretability of predictions. Experiments conducted on a diverse, field-collected dataset from Bardhaman, Bankura, and Purulia districts achieve a classification accuracy of 99.94%, demonstrating superior generalization, robustness, and explainability compared to classical approaches. This study highlights the practical potential of quantum-enhanced AI for precision agriculture.
In modern agriculture, high crop yields and food security depend on early and accurate identification of plant diseases. Deep learning (DL) models like convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have successfully classified plant disease using leaf images. Classical models are adequate for small-scale applications but inefficient for large-scale applications because of their high processing requirements and difficulty in handling highdimensional data. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes the Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) by leveraging the Cirq library to introduce quantum circuit simulation. The QCNN model is trained on the Kaggle coffee plant dataset and JMuBEN Mendeley. Quantum Fourier transforms (QFT) are used to preprocess the input images for enhanced quality and to find regions of interest (ROI) for disease lesions. The empirical results prove that the QCNN has drastically improved the model's performance in each phase of the epoch when compared with the traditional CNN model. In the training phase, the QCNN accomplished 96.98 %, whereas the CNN achieved 88.95 % for 150 epochs. Similarly, an effective performance is accomplished during the testing phase by QCNN with 95.89% in comparison with the CNN performance of 85.77 %. Hence, this work emphasizes the power of QCNN in faster training and analytical capabilities using entanglement and superposition in the quantum domain.
Plants are susceptible to numerous illnesses during their growth stages, rendering early diagnosis a significant challenge in contemporary agriculture. Not being able to find infections early on can greatly lower agricultural yields and hurt farmers' incomes. There are several new methods that use Machine Learning and Deep Learning to solve this problem; however they generally have low classification accuracy or need millions of trainable parameters, which makes them less efficient. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) model for the automated detection of plant diseases. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no literature that has investigated QCNNs for this purpose. This work employs the proposed approach to detect Bacterial Spot disease in peach plants utilizing leaf photos from the publicly accessible Plant Village dataset. The system only needs 9,914 trainable parameters to work, and it gets 94.96 % accuracy. These results show that QCNNs are good at predicting plant diseases and could be useful in other areas of agriculture as well.
Accurate image classification is vital in smart agriculture, where early detection of plant diseases can boost crop yield and sustainability. While traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) perform well, they face computational and scalability issues as dataset sizes grow. To address this, we propose a quantum-enhanced deep learning framework that combines the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT) for image preprocessing with a Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) for classification. QFT transforms images into the frequency domain, highlighting disease-related features and reducing background noise, while QCNN leverages quantum principles like superposition and entanglement for faster and more efficient feature learning. We evaluated four architectures—classical CNN, QCNN, CNN+QFT, and the hybrid QCNN+QFT—on coffee leaf datasets containing 2,000, 5,000, and 12,000 images. Across all dataset sizes, QCNN+QFT consistently achieved the highest accuracy and lowest training times. On the largest dataset, it reached 98.87% accuracy in 25.46 seconds per epoch, compared to the CNN’s 85.13% in 638.39 seconds. For 5,000 images, it achieved 94.78% in 11.30 seconds, outperforming CNN’s 83.42% in 215.57 seconds. Even on 2,000 images, it scored 90.06% in 2.12 seconds versus CNN’s 79.23% in 67.48 seconds. While QCNN and CNN+QFT also improved over the classical CNN, neither matched the hybrid’s superior balance of speed and accuracy, demonstrating its potential for scalable, real-time plant disease detection.
Indonesia is an agricultural country that was once listed as the third largest country in terms of rice production. Several factors, such as pests and diseases, are factors in Indonesia's decline in rice productivity. This research explores the integration of quantum computing into classical convolutional neural networks (CNN) for the classification of rice leaf diseases. The study utilizes a hybrid quantum neural network (HQNN) model by combining classical CNN with quantum circuits to evaluate the effect of quantum computing in enhancing agricultural disease detection. The dataset comprises 5932 images of rice leaves affected by four distinct diseases, with each image standardized to 300×300 pixels. The HQNN models were benchmarked against traditional CNN, significantly improving classification accuracy. HQNN reached the best training accuracy of 99.93% and validation accuracy of 99.83%. These findings show that quantum computing has great potential in terms of performance, especially when quantum hardware becomes more accessible. The research concludes by suggesting the need for further exploration with more extensive and diverse datasets to realize the benefits of HQNN in diverse agricultural applications fully.
This paper presents a novel approach to crop disease classification through the integration of quantum computing principles with deep learning techniques. We introduce a hybrid quantum neural network architecture that leverages quantum mechanical phenomena, including superposition and entanglement, to enhance crop disease detection capabilities. Using a comprehensive dataset of 23,265 images spanning 19 disease classes across five major crop species, our model achieved a test accuracy of 0.7958 with a weighted average F1-score of 0.85. The architecture combines classical convolutional layers for initial feature extraction with quantum processing units for advanced pattern recognition, demonstrating significant potential in the diagnosis of agricultural diseases. Our findings establish the viability of quantum-enhanced neural networks in agricultural applications, while highlighting pathways for future development in quantum machine learning systems.