Department of Computer

Science
https://mnsuam.edu.pk/department-of-
computer-science/

MNS-University of Agriculture,
Old Shujabad Road, Multan

Research Proposal for MS-Computer Science

Student Name: Asif Mureed Student Reg. No. 2015-UAM-53

Research Title
Disease Detection on the Leaves of the Tomato Plants by Using Deep Learning

Background of Research
Automation in plant disease detection and diagnosis is one of the challenging research areas
that have gained significant attention in the agricultural sector. Traditional disease detection
methods rely on extracting handcrafted features from the acquired images to identify the type
of infection. Also, the performance of these works solely depends on the nature of the
handcrafted features selected. This can be addressed by learning the features automatically
with the help of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). This research presents two different
deep architectures for detecting the type of infection in tomato leaves. The first architecture
applies residual learning to learn significant features for classification. The second
architecture applies attention mechanism on top of the residual deep network. Experiments
were conducted using Plant Village Dataset comprising of three diseases namely early blight,
late blight, and leaf mold. The proposed work exploited the features learned by the CNN at
various processing hierarchy using the attention mechanism and achieved an overall accuracy
of 98% on the validation sets in the 5-fold cross-validation.
Tomato occupies a prominent place in the Algerian agricultural economy (Nechadi et al.
2002).
In fact, tomato is planted on an area of 22,597 ha with a yearly production of 975,075 t
(FAOSTAT 2016).
As regards the production quantity, tomato is ranked seventh among Algerian crops after
potatoes, wheat, watermelons, barley, and onions. Also, Algeria is ranked 19th among
tomato-producing countries (FAOSTAT 2016). Despite this importance of tomato in
Algerian agriculture, its production is limited to 433,424 quintals/ ha (FAOSTAT 2016).
Diseases are often considered as one of the major limiting factors in the cultivation of tomato.
Tomato crops are highly affected by diseases, which causes dramatic losses in agriculture
economy (Hanssen and Lapidot 2012).
For instance, early blight represents one of the most common diseases in the world and can
cause a significant decrease in yields and many lesions in fruits (Blancard 2012).
Likewise, late blight causes serious damages to crops, and it can be very destructive in areas
with humid climate (Blancard 2012).
Protecting tomato from diseases is crucial for improving the quantity and the quality of the
crops.
Thus, providing an early detection and identification of diseases is very helpful in choosing
the correct treatment and stopping the disease from spreading (Al Hiary et al. 2011).
Precision farming can be used to fight against these diseases and pests. By using precision
farming the use of these chemical or costly methods can be reduced. In precision farming,
information technologies such as sensor networks, remote sensing, robotics are used in
agricultural fields. For precise agricultural applications, such as spraying medicine to only
affected area, it is necessary to determine the region where the plant diseases occur and
spread. Operators, static stations, sensor networks, drones and mobile robots are used for
detection in precision farming. In order to be able to do precision farming, it is necessary for
these tools to be able to process and make inferences from collected data like an expert in the
fields or in the greenhouses.
Image processing is widely used precision agriculture for the images taken by remote sensing
devices or field instruments. In the literature, image processing was used widely in the
agriculture. For example, image processing used for the weed detection and the fruit grading ,
for the detecting, quantifying and classifying plant diseases , and for phenotyping of plant
disease symptoms . Recently, deep learning is used for the detection . Mohanty et al. in their
work utilized deep learning to detect diseases from the leaves of the various plants.

Objectives of the Research

 To detect the tomato diseases in early stage.

 To provide the appropriate treatment in time.
 To increase the tomato productivity.
 To automatically detect the disease.
 To ensure minimal losses to the cultivated crop
 To design a computationally inexpensive and accurate learning model for disease
detection.

Need for Research

Tomato holds an inevitable place in the economy of Indian agriculture. India stands third in
the production of tomatoes with a yield of 53,00,000 tons and it is harvested around 3,50,000
hectares of land. The harvest index of tomato in India is comparatively less than in other
countries. One of the major reasons for the reduction in yield is due to diseases that occur
frequently on the leaves of the plant. Tomato crops are highly affected by diseases like
bacterial spot, early blight, late blight, and leaf mold. The blight is the most prevalent disease
among others.
The tomato crop is highly susceptible to a wide range of disease at each stage of its growth.
This is due to different factors based on climatic conditions and environmental parameters.
By identifying these diseases, tremendous loss in the yield can be alleviated. Also, the final
agricultural product obtained in terms of quality and quantity can be improved. It is relatively
complex in real time to maintain a manual record of all the symptoms and signs caused by the
diseases. Also, monitoring of plants in a large field requires extensive manual effort. Hence,
different automation schemes for disease detection were presented in the last two decades.
Agriculture plays an important role in the economy of the any country. So we should have
to protect the tomato crops from diseases on time. Tomata is the daily useful things. When
our tomata crop destroy due to some diseases, mainly in Pakistan tomata prices go high.So
we face the inflation. Nowadays , we are facing this problem tomata prices are high and also
the tomata quality is not good but we are compelled to buy the tomata on the high prices.
Even we are buying Tomato in 350 per kg in Multan. Everybody cannot mange to buy the
tomato in high prices when the quality is not good. It is very big issue in Pakistan tomato
prices go up to sky.
So it is very important to protect the tomato from diseases for Pakistan and also Pakistani’s.
If we detect the disease on time , we can save our tomato crops timely from spoiling.
Protecting tomato from diseases is crucial for improving the quantity and the quality of the
crops.
Thus, providing an early detection and identification of diseases is very helpful in choosing
the correct treatment and stopping the disease from spreading.

Proposed Methodology

CNN to identify diseases in tomato leaves.

This research proposes a novel CNN framework that specializes in the task of infestation
detection in the tomato plant. The objective of this work is to design a computationally
inexpensive and accurate learning model for disease detection. Two different deep
architectures propose in this work, to detect disease infestation in tomato leaf. The first
architecture integrates residual learning on top of a feed-forward CNN. The second
architecture integrates the strengths of Attention mechanism and Residual Learning on CNN.
For the image like high dimensional and relatively big data there is specialized network
architecture called convolutional neural networks (CNNs). CNNs are used for the first time to
detect handwritten digits from the documents . CNNs are consisting of convolutional layers,
pooling layer, activation function layers, dropout layers, and fully-connected layers.
Convolutional layers hold the results of the convolution of filters or kernels with previous
layer. These filters or kernels consists of weights and biases to be learned. Purpose of the
optimization function is generating these kernels, that represents the data without error.
Pooling layers are used for the down sampling to lower neuron size and reduce overfitting.

References

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[8]. Tm, P., Pranathi, A., SaiAshritha, K., Chittaragi, N. B., & Koolagudi, S. G. (2018).
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