A framework for detection and classification of plant leaf and stem diseases

We propose and evaluate a framework for detection of plant leaf/stem diseases. Studies show that relying on pure naked-eye observation of experts to detect such diseases can be prohibitively expensive, especially in developing countries. Providing fast, automatic, cheap and accurate image-processing-based solutions for that task can be of great realistic significance. The proposed framework is image-processing-based and is composed of the following main steps; in the first step the images at hand are segmented using the K-Means technique, in the second step the segmented images are passed through a pre-trained neural network. As a testbed, we use a set of leaf images taken from Al-Ghor area in Jordan. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can significantly support accurate and automatic detection of leaf diseases. The developed Neural Network classifier that is based on statistical classification perform well and could successfully detect and classify the tested diseases with a precision of around 93%.