Abstract

The primary objective of this study is to investigate the detection and diagnosis of plant diseases using Deep Learning and Digital Image Processing. Previous research has primarily focused on single plant disease scenarios using publicly available datasets, often overlooking the image preprocessing phase. In this study, we propose a model that works with 10 different plants and utilizes approximately 50,000 images for training and testing. We classified 36 distinct classes into healthy or infected types based on disease labels. To enhance the accuracy of disease detection, we recommend employing image processing techniques and considering multiple plant scenarios. We utilized a dual-layer Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the publicly available dataset and supplemented it with real-time images captured from various farms in Village Rancharda Near Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India (PIN: 38255). Our research introduces several novel elements in the preprocessing steps. We employed HSV segmentation, flood fills segmentation, and a proposed deep learning model for image segmentation. Additionally, we standardized the resolution of all images to ensure uniformity. These preprocessing techniques refine the image data required for accurate classification and enhance the visibility of diseased portions. For image processing, we employed a sliding window mean average deviation technique and stacked the processed images onto the original image, resulting in six-channel images. Our proposed model demonstrates improved performance on the validation data, achieving an accuracy of up to 97.95%. Furthermore, we transformed this model into a TFLite model, which can be easily integrated into client applications without the need for a server. In our case, we implemented the model on an Android platform. These findings indicate the potential of our proposed model to significantly enhance the detection and diagnosis of plant diseases in real-world scenarios.