Detection of Plant Disease

Introduction

Getting affected by a disease is very common in plants due to various factors such as fertilizers, cultural practices followed, environmental conditions, etc. These diseases hurt agricultural yield and eventually the economy based on it.

Any technique or method to overcome this problem and getting a warning before the plants are infected would aid farmers to efficiently cultivate crops or plants, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Thus, disease detection in plants plays a very important role in agriculture.

The PlantVillage Dataset

We use a publicly available and quite famous, the PlantVillage Dataset. The dataset was published by crowdAI during the "PlantVillage Disease Classification Challenge".

The dataset consists of about 54,305 images of plant leaves collected under controlled environmental conditions. The plant images span the following 14 species:

Apple, Blueberry, Cherry, Corn, Grape, Orange, Peach, Bell Pepper, Potato, Raspberry, Soybean, Squash, Strawberry, and Tomato.

The dataset contains a total of 38 classes of plant disease and 1 class of background images listed below:
Apple Scab	Apple Black Rot	Apple Cedar Rust	Apple Healthy
Blueberry Healthy	Cherry Healthy	Cherry Powdery Mildew	Corn Northern Leaf Blight
Corn Gray Leaf Spot	Corn Common Rust	Corn healthy	Grape Black Rot
Grape Black Measles	Grape Leaf Blight	Grape Healthy	Bell Pepper Healthy
Orange Huanglongbing	Peach Bacterial Spot	Peach Healthy	Bell Pepper Bacterial Spot
Potato Early Blight	Potato Healthy	Potato Late Blight	Raspberry Healthy
Soybean Healthy	Squash Powdery Mildew	Strawberry Healthy	Strawberry Leaf Scorch
Tomato Bacterial Spot	Tomato Early Blight	Tomato Late Blight	Tomato Leaf Mold
Tomato Septoria Leaf Spot	Tomato Two Spotted Spider Mite	Tomato Target Spot	Tomato Mosaic Virus
Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl Virus	Tomato Healthy

Due to the limited computational power, it is difficult to train the classification model locally on a majority of normal machines. Therefore, we use the processing power offered by Google Colab notebook as it connects us to a free TPU instance quickly and effortlessly.