Plant Disease Detection using Deep Learning on Natural Environment Images

Improving agriculture is one of the major concerns today, as it helps reduce global hunger. In past years, many technological advancements have been introduced to enhance harvest quality and quantity by controlling and preventing weeds, pests, and diseases. Several studies have focused on identifying diseases in plants, as it helps to make decisions on spraying fungicides and fertilizers. State-of-the-art systems typically combine image processing and deep learning methods to identify conditions with visible symptoms. However, they use already available data sets or images taken in controlled environments. This study was conducted on two data sets of ten plants collected in a natural environment. The first dataset contained R GB Visible images, while the second contained Near-Infrared (NIR) images of healthy and diseased leaves. The visible image dataset showed higher training and validation accuracies than the NIR image dataset with ResNet, Inception, VGG and MobileNet architectures. For the visible image and NIR dataset, ResNet-50V2 outperformed other models with validation accuracies of 9835% and 94.01%, respectively.

Automated summary

Improving agriculture is crucial for reducing global hunger. Previous studies have focused on using image processing and deep learning methods to identify plant diseases and enhance crop management. This study conducted experiments using two datasets collected in natural environments, finding higher accuracy in the visible image dataset compared to the near-infrared image dataset.