Detection and classification of rice plant diseases

Identification of diseases from the images of a plant is one of the interesting research areas in the agriculture field, for which machine learning concepts of computer field can be applied. This article presents a prototype system for detection and classification of rice diseases based on the images of infected rice plants. This prototype system is developed after detailed experimental analysis of various techniques used in image processing operations. We consider three rice plant diseases namely Bacterial leaf blight, Brown spot, and Leaf smut. We capture images of infected rice plants using a digital camera from a rice field. We empirically evaluate four techniques of background removal and three techniques of segmentation. To enable accurate extraction of features, we propose centroid feeding based K-means clustering for segmentation of disease portion from a leaf image. We enhance the output of K-means clustering by removing green pixels in the disease portion. We extract various features under three categories: color, shape, and texture. We use Support Vector Machine (SVM) for multi-class classification. We achieve 93.33% accuracy on training dataset and 73.33% accuracy on the test dataset. We also perform 5 and 10-fold cross-validations, for which we achieve 83.80% and 88.57% accuracy, respectively.