Expert Systems Applied to Plant Disease Diagnosis: Survey and Critical View

Expert systems have been applied to solve agricultural problems for some time. The complexities involved in plant disease diagnosis make this problem a prime candidate for the application of expert systems. Those same complexities, however, make the development of a viable system a very challenging task. Many attempts at creating such tools have been reported in the literature, with different scopes and degrees of success. This article had the objective of organizing all the information that has been published on the subject in the last four decades by presenting a brief individual description of each proposed system, and then condensing all the information into a critical analysis of how the problem was handled in the past, how it evolved into the current scenario, and which are the possible directions to be explored in the future.