Grape leaf disease detection from color imagery using hybrid intelligent system

Vegetables and fruits are the most important export agricultural products of Thailand. In order to obtain more value-added products, a product quality control is essentially required. Many studies show that quality of agricultural products may be reduced from many causes. One of the most important factors of such quality is plant diseases. Consequently, minimizing plant diseases allows substantially improving quality of the products. This work presents automatic plant disease diagnosis using multiple artificial intelligent techniques. The system can diagnose plant leaf disease without maintaining any expertise once the system is trained. Mainly, the grape leaf disease is focused in this work. The proposed system consists of three main parts: (i) grape leaf color segmentation, (ii) grape leaf disease segmentation, and (iii) analysis & classification of diseases. The grape leaf color segmentation is pre-processing module which segments out any irrelevant background information. A self-organizing feature map together with a back-propagation neural network is deployed to recognize colors of grape leaf. This information is used to segment grape leaf pixels within the image. Then the grape leaf disease segmentation is performed using modified self-organizing feature map with genetic algorithms for optimization and support vector machines for classification. Finally, the resulting segmented image is filtered by Gabor wavelet which allows the system to analyze leaf disease color features more efficient. The support vector machines are then again applied to classify types of grape leaf diseases. The system can be able to categorize the image of grape leaf into three classes: scab disease, rust disease and no disease. The proposed system shows desirable results which can be further developed for any agricultural product analysis/inspection system.