<![CDATA[This study compares the performance of two deep learning methods, You Only Look Once version 8 (YOLOv8) and the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) EfficientNetB0, in detecting and classifying maize leaf diseases. The background of this research stems from the importance of early plant disease identification to support food security, as well as the limitations of manual inspection methods, which are slow, subjective, and inefficient. The study combines primary and secondary data, totaling 2,000 images that underwent undersampling, augmentation, resizing, and bounding box annotation for YOLO training needs. Both models were trained on the same dataset with an 80% training and 20% testing split. YOLOv8n was trained using a transfer learning approach for 30 epochs, while the CNN was trained using EfficientNetB0 with similar training parameters. The results show that YOLOv8 achieved high detection performance with an mAP@0.5 of 0.985 and the highest class accuracy in the Healthy category (0.99). Meanwhile, the CNN demonstrated more stable classification performance, achieving the highest accuracy in the Grey Leaf Spot class (0.99) and a validation accuracy of 0.96. The comparison indicates that YOLO excels in object detection and disease localization in field images, whereas the CNN is more consistent in classifying segmented leaf images. These findings provide practical implications for real world deployment: YOLOv8 is suitable for real time detection in field conditions, including potential integration into mobile based early warning systems for farmers, while EfficientNetB0 is more appropriate for offline or laboratory based classification of static leaf samples.]]>
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