<p>The agriculture industry's production and food quality have been impacted by plant leaf diseases in recent years. Hence, it is vital to have a system that can automatically identify and diagnose diseases at an initial stage for enhancing the quality of agricultural output and also for stopping the overall plant extinction. Most state-of-the-art methods do not provide appropriate accuracy of identification when the similarity among different diseases is higher and the input leaf images have complex background. In this work, a transfer learning-based automated crop disease recognition system is proposed to handle this problem. The cotton leaf disease detection framework&#xa0;being proposed here includes two key stages: (1) the feature extraction stage, where the convolutional neural network (CNN) model from the visual geometry group (VGG-16) is employed to obtain the deep features from cotton leaf images with complex background. (2) Cotton leaf disease detection stage: Here, the extracted optimal features are input to the machine learning classifiers, namely random forest (RF) and nonlinear support vector machine (SVM), for the initial classification of the diseases. For providing an optimal cotton crop disease detection performance, Kaggle’s four-class cotton disease dataset with complex background is chosen in this work. For the final decision making and analysis, two hybrid models named spatial attention-based hybrid VGG-RF and hybrid VGG-SVM have been proposed in this work for enhancing the decision accuracy. These hybrid models offered an average accuracy of approximately 98.29% and 99.31%, respectively, which is higher than the accuracy provided by the related work. This proved that the proposed hybrid model, namely spatial attention-based VGG-SVM and VGG-RF models, with spatial attention outperformed the state-of-the-art classifiers.</p>