Disease Identification in Plants Using K-means Clustering and Classification with ANN

The aim of this study is to design, implement and evaluate an image-processing-based software solution for automatic detection and classification of plant leaf diseases. Studies show that relying on pure naked-eye observation of experts to detect and classify 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 methodology of the proposed solution is image-processing-based and is composed of four main phases; in the first phase we create a color transformation structure for the RGB leaf image and then, we apply device-independent color space transformation for the color transformation structure. Next, in the second phase, the images at hand are segmented using the K-means clustering technique. Finally, in the third phase the extracted features are passed through a pre-trained neural network. Present experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can significantly support an accurate and automatic detection and recognition of leaf diseases. The developed Neural Network classifier that is based on statistical classification perform well in all sampled types of leaf diseases and can successfully detect and classify the examined diseases with a precision of around 93%. In conclusion, the proposed detection models based neural networks are very effective in recognizing leaf diseases, whilst K-means clustering technique provides efficient results in segmentation RGB images.