Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering (2020) 27:611–632

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11831-019-09324-0

ORIGINAL PAPER

Applications of Computer Vision in Plant Pathology: A Survey

Siddharth Singh Chouhan1 · Uday Pratap Singh2 · Sanjeev Jain1

Received: 7 July 2018 / Accepted: 18 February 2019 / Published online: 23 February 2019
© CIMNE, Barcelona, Spain 2019

Abstract
The real-time decision support system can enhance the crop or plant growth, therefore, increasing their productivity, quality,
and economic value. This also helps us in serving the nature by supervising the plant growth in balancing the environment.
Computer vision techniques have proven to play an important role in the number of applications like medical, defense,
agriculture, remote sensing, business analysis, etc. The use of digital image processing methods for simulating the visual
capability of the human being has proven to be a dynamic feature in smart or precision agriculture. This concept has provided
with the automatic preventing and monitoring of plants, cultivation, disease management, water management etc. to increase
the crop productivity and quality. In this paper, we have surveyed the number of articles that adopt the concept of computer
vision and soft computing methods for the identification and classification of diseases from the leaf of the plant. Our aim
is to present the state of the art of the concepts, applications, and theories associated with the digital image processing and
soft computing methodologies. The various outcomes have been discussed separately.

1 Introduction
It is well said that the things or objects human visualize are
quite easy to remember and analyse. The eyes acts as the
capturing device that capture light and transforms it into
the signal that are then transmitted to the brain through the
optic nerve. The brain then learns this information for its
better understanding. The Computer vision concept is the
technology for analyzing and understanding the real-time
information visually with the help of computer systems or
machines. These system facsimiles the visual capability of
the living organisms especially of the human to some extent
[1, 2]. The real world information in the form of signal and
images is acquired with the help camera acting as an eye for
the system and has been processed with the help of computer
to get some useful information from it. Because of this con-
cept the computers attains higher computational intelligence
to solve number of complex real word problems. Digital
image processing is known to be the method of converting
* Siddharth Singh Chouhan
siddharth.lnct@gmail.com
1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, Katra,
Jammu and Kashmir 182320, India
2
Department of Mathematics, Shri Mata Vaishno Devi
University, Katra, Jammu and Kashmir 182320, India
an image from signal from to the digital form. Though data
acquired in the signal form is not easy to understand it has
been converted into the 0’s and 1’s for better understanding
of the data. The core technology of computer vision system
depends on the theory of digital image processing. Image
acquisition, image preprocessing, feature extraction, object
extraction are the basic steps of digital image processing
that helps in understanding an image. The computer vision
concepts and the digital image processing has proven to be
an important aspect in number of applications like medi-
cal, defense, remote sensing, smart or precision agriculture,
business analytics and so on. The artificial intelligence and
robotics are entirely depended upon these technologies [3,
4].
Smart agriculture is also known to be the third green
revolution is the concept of involving the modern day
technologies, systems, and devices into the agriculture. It
is the collaboration of many terminologies like the inter-
net of things, cameras, sensors, big data, GPS, unmanned
vehicle devices like drone etc. for improving the quality
and productivity of the crop. The smart devices like cam-
eras and sensors are placed into the fields for gathering
the information. This information is transmitted to the
decision support system with the help of internet. This
gathered information is then analyzed for making the deci-
sion in management and operations for the betterment of
the crop productivity and quality. Digital images acquired

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from camera plays an important in this perspective. The
images taken of the plant reflects its growth, disease if any,
the life cycle, etc. the image of soil shows the over and
undersupply of water, nutrient deficiency, weed among the
crop etc., the hyperspectral images are used for calculat-
ing the vegetation indexes, the satellite images are used
for computing in the vegetation area and non-vegetation
area, the hemispherical images are used for measuring the
canopy etc. [5, 6].
Plants serve as the basis for sustainability and balancing
of the environment. They provide oxygen to the living organ-
isms. They provide shelter and food to the living organisms.
The plant gets affected by the diseases and the disorders just
like any other living organism does. The plant is affected
in the several ways like dropping of fruits, flower, leaves,
and sometime the plant may die by these factors, therefore,
reducing its economic and social value. The diseases are
majorly classified among fungi, bacteria, virus and the dis-
order are classified by non-living factors like temperature,
humidity, wind, rainfall, nutrient deficiency etc.
The plant leaves are responsible for making food for
them. The process of photosynthesis lies in the fact that the
leaf absorbs the sunlight and transforms it into chlorophyll
serving as in food for the plant. The plant dies if it does not
get sufficient amount of food that it requires to live in. This
is caused because the leaf either drops or get affected by
some disease or disorder making it deficient to complete
the process of photosynthesis. Therefore an effective and
expedient mechanism is required for managing, preventing,
and controlling the disease occur in the plant leaf. Numerous
authors have worked in providing an appropriate solution to
this problem and counter measuring them with the help of
computer vision techniques, digital image processing, and
soft computing methodologies. In this paper, we have sur-
veyed the underlying concepts, theories, and methods that
have been used for the diagnosing of diseases from the plant
leaf image.
This paper contributes the various studies related to the
use of the image in the disease identification and classifica-
tion from the leaf of plants. The underlying technologies and
the concepts have been presented in this work. The motiva-
tion behind this work is to encapsulate the researchers to
work in this field. The primary importance is in develop-
ing the real-time decision support system that could help
in increasing the crop productivity and quality. And the
secondary importance is in serving the nature by managing
plants growth for balancing the environmental conditions.
The organization of the article is in Sect. 2 various con-
cepts and theories have been given, Sect. 3 introduces the
concept of plant pathology, Sect. 4 contains the literature
review for use of images in plant pathologies, in Sect. 5
various outcomes have been given separately, and Sect. 6
concludes the article followed by references.
13
S. S. Chouhan et al.
2 Related Concepts and Theories
2.1 Computer Vision
Is termed as to be the science of simulating the machine
in order to extract, analyze, and understand an image hav-
ing the information of the real world by visualizing it just
like the human does. The digital images are processed
with the computers or machine to achieve artificial intel-
ligence. Image acquisition, image preprocessing, feature
extraction, object recognition and extracting the needful
data from an image are the basic steps of computer vision.
The underlying concept has vast areas of applications in
remote sensing, medical image processing, smart or preci-
sion agriculture, satellite image, defense etc.
2.2 Digital Image Processing
Is the transformation of an analog image data into digital
data (i.e. 0’s and 1’s) by using computers in order to ana-
lyze and understand it.
2.3 Color Space Models
Are the different type of color means that are used in
image and signal processing. There are mainly five color
models are utilized named RGB, HSV, L*u*v, L*a*b, and
Y’CrCb.
2.4 Feature and Feature Extraction
The feature is the specific property like edge, shape, size
color etc. of an object that has been used for extracting
information from an image. Whereas feature extraction is
the process related to performing this computational task.
It is the most important task for object segmentation in the
number of applications. Based on the abstraction level of
an application the features are classified among pixel level,
local, global and domain-specific features that are further
classified by two low level and high-level feature extraction.
2.5 Low Level Feature Extraction
In this method, the information is retrieved based on some
attributes like color, texture, and edge of an object from the
image. Color histogram, Features from Accelerated Seg-
ment Test (edge detector) are some of the feature based
algorithms and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT),
Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Speed-Up Robust
Feature detector (SURF), Fast-SIFT (F-SIFT) are some of
Applications of Computer Vision in Plant Pathology: A Survey 613
the texture based algorithms that have been used for feature
extraction purpose.
2.6 High Level Feature Extraction
It is the process of discriminating the object with higher
accuracy lies on the low-level feature extraction method.
Region-based or fixed shape matching and Active Contours
or Deformable shape analysis are some of the high-level
feature extraction methods.
2.7 Smart or Precision Agriculture
Is known as the adaptation of emerging technologies,
devices, and methods in farming for better crop productiv-
ity. The devices like camera, sensors, wi-fi devices etc. with
technologies like machine learning, computer vision, inter-
net of things etc. are used in order to develop the decision
support system that automatically controls and manages the
productivity of crops.
2.8 Hyperspectral Imaging
Also known as the imaging spectroscopy collaborates with
the functionality of image processing and spectroscopy. The
hyperspectral camera captures the light intensity or spectrum
for every pixel in an image having contiguous spectral bands
for finding objects given in an image.
2.9 Phytopathology (Plant Pathology)
Is termed as to be the science of studying the disease occurs
in the plant. Where Pathogen meaning disease.
2.10 Soft Computing
It is the methodology of developing a system having the
capability of imitating the human brain for solving real-
world complex problems. The soft computing is the collec-
tion of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and evolu-
tionary computing methods. Fuzzy logic, artificial neural
network, and genetic algorithm are the core approaches of
this consortium.
2.11 Neural Network
Is termed as to be the artificial computational mechanism
that simulates the working of the biological neural system
for solving the real-life complex problems. The structure of
the neural network consists of the connection of the neu-
rons that are able to learn and process the information. More
likely the neural network composed of three layers named as
input, hidden and output.
2.12 Support Vector Machine (SVM)
Is the supervised machine learning algorithm that is used for
the purpose of classification and regression. In this method,
every data item is placed in the n-dimensional feature space
by separating them among the specified coordinate. Then
with the help of the hyperplane (line in 2D), we classify the
two planes. The example is shown for separating circle and
triangles among two separate classes in Fig. 1.
2.13 K‑Means
It is the unsupervised machine algorithm that finds the fixed
number of clusters for the given set of the data. The data
items having some common attribute or property lies in the
same cluster or group. Each cluster has its centroid value
depending on what the very data point in the data set lies in
the cluster whose centroid is nearly located. K-means finds k
clusters assigning every data point falling into some cluster.
The example is shown for k = 3 (three clusters) in Fig. 2.
3 Plant Pathology (Phytopathology)
Plant pathology is the science that deals with the study of
the plant and the disease occur in the plant. It is the mech-
anism that understands the growth, the life cycle and the
death of the plant. Plant pathology is also termed as Phy-
topathology derived from the Greek words where Phyto
meaning plant, patho meaning diseases and logo meaning
knowledge. Pathology is the study of the disease or disor-
der occurring in the plant influenced by the factors such
as biological conditions, nutrient deficiencies, weather, and
microorganisms. The plant pathology is also responsible for
A
y
x
Fig. 1  Support vector machine example
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614 S. S. Chouhan et al.

Plant anatomy
y

Bacteriology Mycology
K=3

Phycology Virology

Protozoology Microbiology
Nematology

x Fig. 4  The sciences of plant pathology

Fig. 2  K means example for k = 3

the study of such diseases and disorders for providing the
appropriate solutions in controlling, preventing and manag-
ing them. The main objective of the plant pathology is given
in Fig. 3. Where Aetiology refers to the study of diseases or
disorders caused by abiotic or biotic agents. Pathogenesis
is the study of disease mechanism in the plant. Epidemiol-
ogy is the study of the interactions among the plant and the
pathogens with respect to the environmental conditions and
Management and control is the development of the appro-
priate management strategy to irradiate the diseases and to
minimize the loss.
Phytopathology or plant pathology being the subfield of
agriculture science is introduced that refers to the study of
the diseases occurring in the plant. The term plant pathol-
ogy also relates to the study of Plant anatomy or Phytotomy
(is the study of the internal structure of the plant), Mycol-
ogy (the study of fungus), Virology (is the study of viruses),
Microbiology (states the study of microorganisms), Nematol-
ogy (is the study of nematode or worms), Bacteriology (is the
study of bacteria), Phycology (refers to the study of algae),
and Protozoology (is the study of protozoa) shown in Fig. 4.
There are several factors that influence the normal growth
of the plant. According to Elvin Stakman and Geroge Harrar,
plant diseases is a physiological disorder or structural abnor-
mality that is harmful to the plant or its parts or products
thereby reducing the productivity and economic value. Fur-
ther, these factors can be classified into two classes known
to be disorder and diseases. The disorder termed as to be the
ecological conditions without the sign and symptom and the
diseases are known to be the biological factors that affect the
plant growth with sign and symptoms. These diseases and
disorder can further be classified into three types given in
Fig. 5. The biotic factors are also known as the pathogens
Abioc factors

Bioc factors
Nutrient Air
Objecves of plant deficiency pollutants
pathology
Fungus Protozoa

Epidemiology Aeology

Bacteria Nematodes

Humidity Rainfall
Management
Pathogenesis
and control Virus

Temperature

Fig. 3  Objectives of Plant pathology Fig. 5  Classification of plant diseases

13
 Table 1  Introduction to commonly occuring diseases
Name of disease Caused by Symptoms Plant affected Climatic conditions

Leaf spot Fungal/bacteria Black Spots of variable size, shape, Ornamentals and shade trees Spring season
(anthracnose, scab, leaf blotch, shot and color, when caused by fungi it
hole) is known as Septoria leaf spot, and
when caused by bacteria known as
Bacterial leaf spot
Blight Fire blight by bacteria Have larger area covered than leaf Fire blight affects fruit trees includ- Cool, moist conditions
(fire blight, Early blight, Late Blight, Early blight by fungal spot, appearing to have blighting ing apple, pears, roses and small
Bacterial Blight) Late blight by fungal, bacterial surface and brown to black spots fruit, Early blight affects ornamen-
blight by bacteria tal plants, vegetables, fruit trees,
and shade trees, Late Blight affects
small plant like peppers, potatoes,
and tomatoes
Rusts (pustules) Fungal Can be bright yellow, orange-red, Woody and herbaceous plants Mild, moist conditions
reddish-brown or black in color,
look like leaf spot
Applications of Computer Vision in Plant Pathology: A Survey

Powdery mildew Fungal White to light grayish in color on Different plants Cool, moist, warm conditions
the leaf
Downy mildew Fungal Generally pale yellow, green to Number of ornamental and edible Wet weather conditions
yellow plants, including grapevines,
onions, peas, tobacco etc
Canker Bacteria Appears to be pin-point spot on leafs Many plants including lemon, grape- Warm and rainfall situations
fruit, lime, etc
Gall Insects/Fungal/Bacteria Appears to be Balls, knobs, lumps, Mostly seen on oak tree All conditions are favorable reliant on
or warts, with different colors like the disease
red, green, yellow, or black
Leaf Curl Virus/Fungal The leaf become thick and wrinkled Affects backyard orchards most During cool, wet spring weather
causing them to curl and twist commonly on peach and nectarine
tree
Wilt (Stewart’s Wilt, Fusar- Bacteria/fungal Leaf develops yellow in color more Crops and plant like tomato, cotton, Dry weather and low moisture condi-
ium + Verticillium Wilt) often in V shape and watermelons tions
Chlorosis (discoloration) Lack of Nutrient  The leaf becomes yellow in color Citron, grapes plant All conditions are favorable depend-
due to insufficient chlorophyll ing on deficiency
Stunting Virus/Fungal/Bacteria The plant stops growing Tobacco etc. Varies depending upon the plant
Club Root Fungal Leaves turn yellow, purple or brown Plants like cabbage, broccoli, cauli- High moisture conditions
flower etc.
Leaf blister Fungal (Taphrina caerulescens) Leaves swollen, crinkled, and Apricot, cherry, plum, oak etc. Cool and moist conditions
distorted with yellow, red, purple,
brown, whitish, or gray blisters
Blackspot Fungal (Diplocarpon rosae) Purple or black spots see on the Mostly rose plant but affects other Spring season
leaves, falling of leaf plant also
Molds Fungal Small, white, gray, yellow, or pale More commonly in tomato plant Humid conditions
green patches on leaf

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616 S. S. Chouhan et al.

that are living organism’s causes for example fungi, algae,

bacteria etc. Mesobiotic factors can be living or non-living

Tobacco, potato, soybean, cucumber Varies depending upon the plant

organisms that cause disease or disorder for example virus or
viroid. Abiotic factors are the environmental conditions that

Late winter or early spring

Wet, cool weather, spring
Warm and humid climate
cause disease or disorder for example temperature, rainfall,
humidity, nutrient deficiency etc.
Climatic conditions

Variable conditions
Variable conditions
Variable conditions
Variable conditions

Variable conditions
These disorder or diseases causing the significant loss in
Warm conditions

yield, reducing the quality of the plant produced by:

Summer
(a) Stirring of the host plant by continuously inheriting the
nutrients.
(b) Interfering with the metabolic course of the plant.
Apple, potato, cereals, cucumber etc
Most commonly Vegetables, cotton,

(c) Consuming the cell content of the host.

(d) Suppressing the translocation of the photosynthesis
strawberry, and orchard trees

Wheat, sugarcane, maize etc

from leaves to the other part of the plant.

Citrus, grapes conifers etc

(e) Reducing the leaf surface area.
(f) Interfering with the translocation of the carbohydrates,

Any plant or tree

Any plant or tree
Leaves have silvery discoloration and Any plant or tree

Any plant or tree

minerals, water etc. in xylem and phloem thus reducing
Leaf have white, bleached areas, turn Any plant/tree

Grapevine etc
Plant affected

the chlorophyll content.

According to the Food and Agricultural Organization, the

etc

pathogens causes about 14–16% loss to the plants. Hence it

early stage and turns dark, powdery

is necessary to study the life cycle of the diseases and make

Leaf turn brown, distorted and falls

Leaf becomes pale and often drops

Look like galls that are softened in

efforts for counter measuring them. Integrated disease man-

Discolored, angular blotches on

Twisting, discoloration of leaf

Withered or tip burn of leaves

agement (IDM) the collaboration of the various methods

Leafs dries up and distorted
Leaf wither and drop down

including cultural, chemical, biological, and physical has been

used for the plant disease control and management.
becomes tattered

The number of studies has been made for controlling and

mass later on

managing the diseases that occur in the plant. Based on these

Nutrients or pH value/water/oxygen Several affects

studies it is found that the first activity is to discover the dis-

Symptoms

distorted
leaves

ease. The disease is well recognized depending upon its shape,

down

color, size etc. Generally, the symptoms are different for dif-
ferent kind of diseases, but some diseases occur with almost
same kind of symptoms, therefore, making it hard to identify
Yellow dwarf, mosaic, bud blight

the disease by the naked eye. If the disease is identified then its
life cycle has to study next. More often the plant diseases are
Over/under water supply

Ocean spray an road salt

caused by fungal, bacteria and virus, therefore the life cycle of

these diseases should be well known in advance. In Table 1.
High temperature
Cool temperature

we have tabularized more frequently occurring plant diseases.

Fungal/bacteria

Air pollution

We have also mentioned some of the natural deficiency occur-

High wind
Caused by

ring in the plant due to nutrients.

Fungal
Fungal

4 Literature Review

Convolutional Neural Networks has been used for the

classification of weeds from the images of the soybean
crop. An image dataset is created having about 15,000
Table 1  (continued)

Moisture Imbalance

images of the crop site by the authors dos Santos Ferreira

Name of disease

Ozone damage
Wind Damage

et al. [7]. The learning of the CNN was carried out with
Soil structure
Salt damage
Cold Injury

Heat Injury
Nematodes

the help of CaffeNet. The SLIC Superpixel algorithm was

Viruses

used for the optimization of the dataset makes it suitable

Smuts
Scabs

for CaffeNet. Cope et al. [8] has presented a review of

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Applications of Computer Vision in Plant Pathology: A Survey 617
the various image processing techniques that have been
employed for the shake of measuring plant health and their
species. The concepts related to the botanical theory has
also been discussed by the authors. The authors have also
given the various aspects related to the measurement of
leaf outlines, flower shape, vein structures and leaf tex-
tures, along with the analytical methods to perform them.
A survey on digital image processing techniques for the
identification of disease from the plant leaf and stem was
given by Barbedo [9]. The proposed work is then classified
into the three classes given by detection, severity quanti-
fication, and classification. A review of the various soft
computing methods used for the precision agricultural and
biological engineering are presented in the work proposed
by Huang et al. [10].
Camargo and Smith [11] have also proposed a color
image based analysis of the plant for the identification
of diseases. They have transformed the RGB image into
H, I3a, and I3b color transformations. Further carrying
out the segmentation based on the histogram of based on
the intensity level that advantageous the proposed work
in identifying the images differ in the intensity distribu-
tion. Hassanien et al. [12] proposed the method based on
moth-flame fitness function and rough sets incorporated
with Support vector machine (SVM) whereas the fitness
function is used for the purpose of feature selection and
SVM has been used for the classification of the Powdery
mildew and early blight from the tomato plant. Johannes
et al. [13] has presented a real-time mechanism for an early
detection of diseases from the captured images through the
mobile devices. Candidate hot-spot detection and statisti-
cal inference based algorithm are adopted for the auto-
mated identification of disease rough environment. The
proposed work was employed on septoria, rust and tan
spot diseases on wheat images. Yet another image process-
ing based algorithm was proposed by Dey et al. [14] for
leaf rot disease detection on betel vine. The feature of the
rotted area has been segmented based on the color. The
Otsu thresholding method has been used for the purpose
of segmentation of leaf images.
Anand et al. [15] has proposed a method based on the
artificial neural network for the identification of brinjal
leaf disease from images. The disease named as Bacterial
Wilt, Cercospora Leaf Spot, Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV)
is quite effectively identified by the proposed network.
Dandawate and Kokare [16] have proposed a novel work
for the identification of disease occur in the soybean plant.
The images were captured in the real-time environment
and a decision support system has been set up that further
validates the result and coveys the necessary information
to the farmers. The images are first acquired and preproc-
essed then multi-thresholding has been done for obtaining
the region of interest. Further, the Scale Invariant Feature
Transform (SIFT) is used that recognizes the leaf shape.
Finally, the support vector machine has been used for the
classification of the disease and healthy leaves. Singh
et al. [17] has presented a review of the various machine
learning methodologies used in the plant pathology. The
authors have presented a number of approaches that are
used for the identification, classification, quantification
and prediction of the plant stress phenotyping and plant
breeding activities.
Chouhan et al. [18] has presented a radial basis function
neural network for the identification and classification of six
fungal diseases from the leaf images of the plant. The region
growing algorithm has been used for the purpose of feature
extraction and the optimization of the neural network has
been performed using the bacterial foraging optimization.
Vijaya Lakshmi and Mohan [19] presented a leaf classifi-
cation process named as Fuzzy Relevance Vector Machine
(FRVM) based on the features including color, texture, and
shape. The optimum features have been extracted by using
Particle swarm optimization. Cellular automata filter is used
for the purpose of noise removal and histogram equaliza-
tion and Region of Interest (ROI) segmentation are used for
image enhancement. For feature extraction, GLCM and the
LBP has been used. For an appropriate leaf disease identifi-
cation, Clement et al. [20] have adopted an image processing
based mechanism for the measurement of foliar bleaching
appears due to the sycamore lace bug, Corythucha ciliata
(SAY) on the Plane tree. Authors have performed an unsu-
pervised classification and segmentation of colored images
accompanying on an original chlorophyll histogram. A dis-
ease named as Late Blight appears in potato plant leafs has
been identified and classified using image processing and
neural network by Biswas et al. [21] the captured images has
been undergone through decorrelation stretching for improv-
ing the color intensity of the images. Then the images have
been segmented using fuzzy c means algorithm and then
after the classification of the disease have been performed
using the NN.
Dhaware and Wanjale [22] has presented the study on
various algorithms depending upon image processing
techniques for the classification of plant leaf diseases. The
various stages for disease classification including image
capturing, enhancement, segmentation, feature extraction
and at last the decision support system has been discussed
separately in this work. The images that were captured
with the help of low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle model
DJI Phantom 3 has been deployed for the tracking of the
foliar disease from the soybean crop images. Tetila et al.
[23] has employed a method named as Simple Linear Itera-
tive Clustering for the segmentation purpose of the images.
The leaf images were classified with the help of attribute
like color, texture shape etc. Dhakate and Ingole [24] has
used GLCM method for the feature extraction process and
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618
k-means algorithm has been deployed for the segmentation
purpose of the preprocessed images for extracting disease
like Bacterial Blight, Fruit Spot, Fruit rot and Leaf spot for
identification and classification using the neural network
from the Pomegranate plant leaves. Mondal et al. [25] has
presented an image processing system for the identification
of leaf disease from the leaves of okra and bitter gourd the
based on the soft computing approach named as Naïve Bayes
classifier. The feature of the leaf images has been extracted
by using the Pearson Correlation Coefficient method. The
proposed method significantly identified Yellow Vein
Mosaic Virus from the leaves. Working with the images cap-
tured from the spectroradiometer and a multispectral CDD
camera. Cui et al. [26] has presented a method for the iden-
tification of the soybean rust. Further the ratio of infected
area (RIA), lesion color index (LCI), and rust severity index
(RSI) were validated for evaluating the performance of the
proposed work. RIA helps in finding the percentage of leaf
area get affected by the disease. LCI evaluates the color of
the leaflet pixels. While RSI was used to compute the stern-
ness of rust infection. Hyperspectral images were used for
classifying raspberry plants by using the selected spectral
ratio collectively with edge detection. Further using the
thresholds and graph theory finally segmentation has been
performed in the work presented by Williams et al. [27]. The
authors have adopted a regular plant in growth and a con-
stant lighting for acquiring the images. Kiani and Mamedov
[28] has presented a novel method based on fuzzy for the
classification among disease leaves and healthy leaves. The
database of the strawberry leaf images has been acquired
with the help of the camera. The proposed work effectively
identifies the iron-deficient and fungi-infected leaves shaped
from the images. Aksoy et al. [29] proposed a growth moni-
toring system for the tobacco plant. The proposed framework
automatically evaluates the number of leaves and sizes of the
leaves quite appropriately.
The paper in [30] by Hamuda et al. presents a survey on
the various plant image segmentation methods. The segmen-
tation methods are classified among the color index-based
segmentation, threshold-based segmentation, and learning-
based segmentation. Of them encompasses is on the color
index-based segmentation. Further in the conclusion the
author have presented the number of merits and demerits of
the color index based segmentation method. Ndo et al. [31]
have done a survey on the study of Phaeoramularia leaf and
fruit spot disease of citrus. The material was collected over
39 locations situated 13 citrus production basins in Came-
roon. Further these 13 citrus were grouped among 5 depend-
ing upon disease severity. The authors stated that with the
increase in altitude of the tree the disease severity increases.
Martinelli et al. [32] has presented a survey of the various
modern-day terminologies used in the precision agriculture.
The authors have enlighten the novel sensors like differential
13
S. S. Chouhan et al.
mobility spectrometer and lateral flow devices, biosensors
based on phage display and biophotonics and remote sens-
ing techniques coupled with spectroscopy-based methods
that lead toward smart farming. Francis et al. [33] at first
presented a brief reviews over the existing image processing
method that helps in diagnosing the plant. Then secondly the
authors have presented a disease identification and classifi-
cation process in pepper plant images. The plant were quite
efficiently classified among the disease and healthy by the
proposed algorithm.
Ganesan et al. [34] proposed an automated image seg-
mentation method based on CIELuv color space and fuzzy
c means for the identification of disease from the leaf of the
plant. The results were validated on the various image pro-
cessing parameters indicates the accuracy of the proposed
work. Dhingra et al. [35] has put on the study of the various
image processing approaches used for the identification and
classification of the disease from the leaf images. The paper
was categorized among two parts that are in the first part the
various approaches used for the purpose of the detection of
the disease has been presented and second part compromises
of the various approaches for the purpose of classification.
Ali et al. [36] has presented an approach for the identifica-
tion of citrus plants disease. The DE color difference algo-
rithm has been utilized to separate the features like color,
shape etc. principle component analysis has been adopted for
reducing the feature set dimension. Support vector machine
using three kernels named as linear kernel, polynomial ker-
nel with soft margin and polynomial kernel with hard margin
has been used for the classification of nutrient-disease from
the oil palm leaf in the work presented by the authors Asraf
et al. [37]. Scharr et al. [38] has presented a comparison of
three segmentation methods for classifying leafs from the
images of Arabidopsis and young tobacco the most com-
monly known rosette plants. The authors have presented
their work in the first Leaf Segmentation Challenge of the
Computer Vision Problems in Plant Phenotyping workshop
held in 2014. Islam et al. [39] have presented an automated
approach based on support vector machine for the disease
identification from the potato plant leaf images by incorpo-
rating the method of image processing and machine learning
algorithms.
Behmann et al. [40] have accommodated the hyperspec-
tral images of barley and maize crop for the identification of
progressive stress development of the diseases of the plant
based on supervised and unsupervised learning. Various
stages have been classified using the support vector machine.
Further to analyze the result of the classification the vegeta-
tion index has been calculated. Waldchen and Mader [41]
have presented a review of the number of image process
techniques for the plant species identification. Further,
they have classified the review upon the plant organ and
features including shape, texture, color, margin, and vein
Applications of Computer Vision in Plant Pathology: A Survey 619
structure. Then they have presented the analysis of various
results depending on the databases. Color transformations,
color histograms, and a pairwise-based classification were
employed by Barbedo et al. [42] for an automatic plant dis-
ease identification approach based on histogram structure.
The authors have worked with 12 different plant species
tested over 82 different biotic and abiotic factors affecting
the plants. Barbedo [43] has presented a brief review of the
innumerable challenges occur during the effective analy-
sis of the plant diseases. The cause of the problem, their
effect, and the solution were given separately in their pro-
posed review work. The method for segmentation of South
American leaf blight (SALB) from rubber crop is presented
by Guyot et al. [44]. The authors have validated their work
under different climatic conditions.
Zhang et al. [45] by adopting the continuous wavelet
analysis (CWA) an advanced spectral method have catego-
rized three different diseases occurs on wheat crop named
as yellow rust, powdery mildew, and aphid. For feature
extraction process a wavelet strategy has been applied to
six different features and at last the classification process
is carried out with the help of Fisher’s linear discriminant
analysis (FLDA). Barbedo [46] based on RGB color model
and thresholding presents a digital image processing method
for the identification and classification of plant leaf disease.
For this purpose, the author has worked with 11 plants hav-
ing 77 different categories of diseases. Working with the
synthetic 3D illumination of Arabidopsis rosette for count-
ing the number of leaves in the plant Ubbens et al. [47] have
proposed a deep convolutional neural network. The authors
have validated the result by working with real plant and syn-
thetic plant for leaf counting task.
Ma [48] has proposed a novel method based on the image
processing and region growing segmentation approach for
the segmentation of foliar disease spots from the real-time
images captured from the vegetable field. The three color
models have been considered for disease recognition named
as the comprehensive color feature (CCF) consists of three
color components, Excess Red Index (ExR), H component
of HSV color space and b component of L*a*b color space.
The proposed work has also been validated on the images
of cucumber suffering from downy mildew disease. The
support vector machine over the neural network has been
considered for the classification of the disease and its region
from the images of leaf in the work presented by Kaur and
Kang [49]. The proposed work considered two datasets i.e.
the forts if used for training the SVM and second for validat-
ing the performance of the work. Khirade and Patil [50] has
presented the study of the image segmentation and feature
extraction methods like artificial neural network, support
vector machine, backpropagation algorithm etc. that are used
for the classification of diseases from the plant leaf images.
Journaux et al. [51] have presented the number of fea-
ture extraction process for analyzing the roughness of the
plant leaf from the images. The methods including Fourier
descriptors, support vector machines were more prominently
considered. The authors have stated that among all the clas-
sifiers the SVM is the one that achieves higher accuracy
for the better understanding of the droplet adhesion mech-
anisms on leaves. Based on the tangential direction (TD)
Zhang et al. [52] have proposed an image segmentation
method for the identification of leaves. The proposed work
was evaluated on 12 different images. The characteristics
like the luminance and linear have been used for identifica-
tion of leaf skeleton. The proposed work can also separate
weed form the other crops quite effectively. Ali-Shtayeh
et al. [53] has presented the study of Squash leaf curl virus
[SLCV–(PAL)] from the three different plant squash, water-
melon, and cucumber plant leaves. Schikora and Schikora
[54] have presented an overview of the image processing
methodologies for the disease recognition from the images
of plants. They have also mentioned about the future aspects
and collaboration of various non-imaging methods like spec-
tro radiometry, high-resolution mass spectrometry imaging,
high throughput protein–protein interactome studies collabo-
rating with the image techniques in order to improve the
analytical power of effectively identifying and classifying
the plant diseases.
Solahudin et al. [55] has adopted a mechanism by cap-
turing the images of chili farms for the monitoring of the
Gemini virus using aerial photography via multi-copter. The
classification of the images has been done using the RGB
color space model and the Bayesian classifier. The proposed
work was evaluated on about 40 chili plants. Jamil et al. [56]
has presented a work for the plant leaf identification based
upon its shape. Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT)
has been used for the shape feature extraction and to describe
the color features the Segmentation-Based Fractal Texture
Analysis (SFTA) has been utilized. Four methods named as
Fit to a Pattern Multivariate Image Analysis (FPM) com-
bined with T2 statistics (FPM-T2), Residual Sum of Squares
statistics (FPM-RSS), Linear discriminant analysis (LDA),
and K-means clustering has been used for the classification
among the disease leaves and healthy leaves. The real-time
images were captured for this purpose by Kruse et al. [57].
Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Net-
work (ANN) has been used by Padol and Sawant [58] for the
identification of grapes leaf disease from the images. The
fusion of the proposed methods are used for the classifica-
tion of the diseases named as Downy Mildew and Powdery
Mildew. Prasad et al. [59] proposed a real time disease moni-
toring of the leaf diseases from the images acquired from the
mobile device. The proposed method is based on the robust
unsupervised L*a*b* color space model based k-means
classification. Based on the image processing and image
13

620
segmentation methods Padol and Yadav [60] has proposed
the method for the detection and classification of disease
from grape leaf image. The segmentation has been carried
out using the k means algorithm and then the features are
extracted. Then with the help of SVM the classification of
the Downy Mildew and Powdery Mildew diseases has been
performed. Working with the local statistical features for
background extraction and HSV color space Parikh et al.
[61] has presented an image processing system for the detec-
tion of disease and estimation of its stage. The images were
acquired from the real environment and the disease named
as Grey Mildew has been detected form the images of cot-
ton plant.
Working with vegetation index of the leaf calculated from
the leaf images acquired Phadikar and Goswami [62] further
examined the effectiveness of the proposed work by calculat-
ing the other metrics known to be Vegetable Index Normal-
ized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Green Normalized
Difference Vegetation Index (GNDVI), Enhanced Vegetation
Indices (EVI), and Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI)
respectively for the images acquired of the rice leaf suffering
from the leaf blast and brown spot. Then based on the fea-
tures like Homogeneity, Correlation, Contrast, Energy and
Entropy the disease was examined. Prajapati et al. [63] has
presented a survey on the leaf crops of the cotton leafs. More
often there are four types of disease occur on the leaf of cot-
ton named as Alternaria leaf spot, Cercospora leaf spot, Bac-
terial blight and Red Spot. Prasad et al. [64] have presented
an unsupervised mechanism based on CIE L*a*b* color and
k means clustering for the real-time monitoring of the leaf
image for the diseases. Mishra et al. [65] has presented an
overall illustration of the importance of the Hyperspectral
Imaging (HSI) for the agricultural images. The authors in
this significantly demonstrates the importance of HIS images
over the conventional images. The ability of HIS in assist-
ing close-range images, the importance of both spatial and
spectral information has been quite effectively discussed
in this work. The wide range of applications for the HIS
like foliar content evaluation, stress-related studies, growth
monitoring etc. along with the platform like high throughput
phenotyping platforms (HTPPs) proves the importance of
hyperspectral images. Hu et al. [66] has proposed a method
named as an improved Chan–Vese (C–V) for the wheat leaf
lesion segmentation. At first color model has been adopted
along with the k means and principal component analysis
for the segmentation of initial segmentation purpose. Then
channels weights has been assigned automatically and at
last the termination condition is given for the effective per-
formance of the proposed work. Narmadha and Arulvadivu
[67] has used k means algorithm for the automatic identifi-
cation and detection of paddy diseases for the images of the
plant. These diseases are caused by the fungus, bacteria etc.
and can be among Blast Disease (BD), Brown spot Disease
13
S. S. Chouhan et al.
(BPD), Narrow Brown spot disease (NBSD) affect the plant
and stops the growth of it.
Ramakrishnan and Sahaya Anselin Nisha [68] has pro-
posed the backpropagation algorithm for the identification
of a disease named as Cercospora from the groundnut leaf
images. The images are first preprocessed through the color
imaginary transform, color co-occurrence matrix, for the
purpose of feature extraction. In the work proposed by Ras-
togi et al. [69] the artificial neural network has been used for
the purpose of identification of plant leaves and the k-means
algorithm has been deployed for the sake of classifying the
disease form the leaf image. The evaluation has been car-
ried out in two phases. In the first phases the leaf is identi-
fied based on its features and then the disease region is seg-
mented in the second phase incorporating Euclidian distance
and k-means. Reza et al. [70] has proposed the Multi-SVM
classifier for the identification of the diseased area from the
stems of jute plants. The real-time images of the jute plants
have been acquired and the classification has been performed
on the device on an android application. For the identifica-
tion and classification of the diseases named as Mildew, Rust
Tan, and Rust RB from the leaves of the soybean plant Pires
et al. [71] has proposed an automated method based on the
Bag of Visual Words technique and local image descriptors.
Zhou et al. [72] has presented a method based on the orienta-
tion code matching (OCM) technique a novel method for the
identification of the disease occurs in the sugar beet plant.
Further, the effectiveness of the proposed work has been
enhanced with the help of support vector machine.
Active contour model has been used for the identification
of the diseases named as Bacterial Blight, Myrothecium and
Alternaria from the leaves of the cotton plant. The real-time
images were captured from the field of the cotton crop by the
author Rothe and Kshirsagar [73] in the proposed work for
the pattern recognition of the disease. Nandhini et al. [74]
has presented a novel work named as the web-enabled dis-
ease detection system (WEDDS) has been presented for the
detection and classification of the diseases from the leaves
of the plants. The presented work adopted the mechanism
of the IoT platform by incorporating Raspberry pi 3 board
for making the proposed work real time. Finally, the dis-
ease in the images was classified using the support vector
machine. Sabrol and Satish [75] have proposed a method
based image segmentation for the identification of the five
types of diseases named as tomato late blight, Septoria spot,
bacterial spot, bacterial canker, tomato leaf curl from the
tomato leaf. The leaf images are also classified among dis-
eased and healthy based on the features like color, shape,
and texture. Sarangi et al. [76] incorporating the internet
of things architecture present an automated system for the
study of the crop-related problems. The system is named as
Automated Crop-disease Advisory Service (ACAS) that is
distributed in nature. Sannakki et al. [77] used k means and
Applications of Computer Vision in Plant Pathology: A Survey 621
feedforward neural network for the identification of the dis-
eases from the leaf of grape plant automatically. The disease
has been segmented by using the k means algorithm and
the FFNN has been assimilated for the classification of the
disease. The disease named as downy mildew and powdery
mildew are classified accurately by the proposed method.
In this work, the authors have presented an enhanced
seeded region growing (SRG) for the segmentation of
plant leaf disease. Sarkar and Pramanik [79] have also used
Euclidean distance to evaluate the difference in the pixels,
region merging algorithm that forms the lookup table and the
color model named as YCbCr to effectively identify the dis-
ease. Zhang et al. [80] has presented an automatic approach
for the identification and classification of the diseases from
the leaf of the cucumber plant. The proposed work works in
three stages. In the first step, the leaf images have been sepa-
rated among the compact region using super-pixel operation.
Then in the second step, the lesion is obtained based on
the features using the frequency pyramid of histograms of
orientation gradients (PHOG) segmentation that has been
performed using the expectation maximization (EM) algo-
rithm. At last the support vector machine has been used to
classify the disease. Zhang et al. [81] has extended their
work based using the on the internet of things architecture.
The authors have used the fusion of k-means, PHOG based
approach for the purpose of leaf disease identification and
classification. Zhang et al. [82] has presented another work
for the leaf disease identification and classification using the
combination of super-pixel clustering and EM algorithm.
Based on the Gabor wavelet transform (GWT) and gray
level co–occurrence matrix (GLCM), Prasad et al. [83] has
proposed a novel approach for the real-time identification
and classification of leaf disease based on the images taken
from the mobile device. The disease like leaf spots and leaf
blotch has been quite accurately segmented by the proposed
method. Angle View Projection (AVP) and Discrete Cosine
Transform (DCT) has been used by Prasad et al. [84] for
the identification of the plant disease from the leaf images.
Singh et al. [85] has presented the brief study of the digi-
tal image segmentation approaches that has been used for
the purpose of leaf disease identification and classification.
Enhancing their work the authors have developed a method
based on the genetic algorithm for the disease identification
in this article. Soni and Chahar [86] adopted the probabilistic
neural network (PNN) for the identification of leaf disease in
the plant. The proposed work works in two phases in the first
phase the feature are extracted based on the segmentation
and in the second phase the PNN has been deployed for the
classification of diseases.
Shrivastava et al. [87] has proposed a method based on
color image sensing and processing for the identification
of Rust, Bacterial Blight, Sudden Death Syndrome, Brown
Spot, Downy Mildew, and Frog Eye the foliar disease occurs
in the soybean plant leaf. Akram et al. [89] has proposed
a method based on the color spaces for the identification
and classification of the leaf disease form the images. The
authors have presented an automated real-time surveillance
system incorporating the parallel processing mechanism
known to be FPGA. For the identification of the plant virus
named as the Tobacco Rattle Virus and the Cucumber Green
Mottle Mosaic Virus Glezakos et al. in [90] has proposed
the genetic algorithm and multilayer neural network. Sup-
port vector machine accompanying the radial basis function
as the kernel has been used by the authors for the detection
and classification of sugarcane borer diseases in the work
presented by Huang et al. [91]. Tete and Kamlu [92] has
presented a digital image processing method for the seg-
mentation of the leaf diseases using the thresholding and
the k-means algorithm.
Gaikwad and Musande [93] has adopted the neural net-
work and SVM for the classification of disease occur in the
leaf of plants. The proposed methods work in two stages in
the first the histogram based analysis has been done and in
the second stage, NN and SVM have been adopted for the
classification of the wheat leaf disease. The leaf of the plants
accompanying Banana, beans, jackfruit, lemon, mango,
potato, tomato, sapota etc. has been segmented for the iden-
tification and classification of diseases in the work proposed
by Singh and Misra [94]. The authors have performed image
segmentation using the genetic algorithm for performing this
work. Linear iterative clustering super-pixel regions genera-
tion, convolutional neural network classification and entropy
rate super-pixel optimization based segmentation has been
performed for the identification of rice panicle in the work
presented by Xiong et al. [95]. The cucumber disease diag-
nosing has been performed based on the fuzzy c means in
the work presented by Bai et al. [96] the proposed approach
worked in three steps for performing the identification of
disease also using the marked-watershed algorithm. Li et al.
[97] has reported unsupervised region generation and super-
vised semantic labeling Prediction for the segmentation of
the cotton leaf images. At first, the simple linear iterative
clustering (SLIC) and density-based spatial clustering of
applications with noise (DBSCAN) on Wasserstein distance
have been adopted to generate regions, then histogram-based
color and texture features are extracted from each region
proposal are passed to Random Forest (RF) for the semantic
segmentation.
The various findings based on the literature have been
tabularized in Table 2. Further, the table has been classified
among the approach used by the author, the plant on what
the authors have worked upon, along with the disease taken
into consideration, further the database or the number of
images taken for evaluation purpose is stated and the future
work mentioned in the articles are given with.
13

Table 2  Literature review summary
References
13
dos Santos Ferreira et al. [7]
Camargo and Smith [11]
Hassanien et al. [12]
Johannes et al. [13]
Dey et al. [14]
Anand et al. [15]
Dandawate and Kokare [16]
VijayaLakshmi and Mohan
[19]
Clement et al. [20]
Biswas et al. [21]
Dhaware and Wanjale [22]
Tetila [23]
Dhakate and Ingole [24]
Mondal et al. [25]
Cui et al. [26]
Kiani and Mamedov [28]
Ndo [31]
Francis et al. [33]
622
Method Plant Disease Dataset/dataset acquisition Future work
Convolutional neural networks Soybean Weed (grass and broadleaf) Self Working with different data-
base, with different crops and
different weeds
Histogram based image seg- Cotton, maize, banana and Different diseases 5 crops/20 images from differ- To extract parameters of the
mentation plantain, alfalfa and soya ent institutes diseased region and classify
MFORSFS algorithm (MFO, Tomato Powdery mildew and early Self Working with best parameters
RS, SVM) blight selection algorithm and with
different dataset
Image segmentation with sta- Wheat Septoria, rust and tan spot 3500 images/self Developing crop protection
tistical inference methods application in real time
RGB color space segmenta- Betel vine Leaf rot 12 images/self –
tion
k-means and Neural network Brinjal Bacterial wilt, Cercospora Self Extending the work for iden-
Leaf Spot, Tobacco mosaic tification of several other
virus (TMV) diseases
SIFT and SVM Soybean – 120 images/self Deploying the proposed work
for different crops and for
stem, fruit, rot, etc.
Particle swarm optimization Several Several 60 images/ICL leaf dataset Working with medicinal leaf
(PSO) and Fuzzy Relevance (220 images), Swedish and images and also including
Vector Machine (FRVM) the Flavia dataset multiple features for disease
extraction
Color vision method Plane Sycamore lace bug 12 images/self Detection similar type of
diseases
Fuzzy c means and backprop- Potato Late blight 27 images/self –
agation neural network
Color/cluster based segmenta- Several Sun burn, yellow-mosaic and 120 images/self To build the real time applica-
tion and SVM grass hopper tion
Simple linear iterative cluster- Soybean Target (leaf) spot, powdery 3624 images/self Using higher resolution cam-
ing mildew eras and CNN
k-means, GLCM and Pomegranate Bacterial Blight, Fruit Spot, 500 images/self –
MLP + BPA Fruit Rot, leaf spot
Naive Bayes classifier Okra and bitter gourd Yellow Vein Mosaic Virus 79 Okra and 75 bitter gourd Removal of noise and shadow
(YVMV) images for higher accuracy
Vegetation index methods Soybean Rust 48 images/self Real time environment and
employing other methods
Fuzzy logic classification Strawberry Iron deficiency, fungal 60 for iron and 50 for fungal/ –
algorithm (FLCA) self
Classification and Citrus Phaeoramularia leaf and fruit Self Working with database having
Regression Trees (CART) spot several images
Feedforward neural network Pepper Berry spot and Quick wilt 20 images/self –
S. S. Chouhan et al.
Disease
 Table 2  (continued)
References Method Plant Disease Dataset/dataset acquisition Future work

Ali et al. [36] ∆E color difference algorithm Citrus
and PCA
Asraf et al. [37] Support vector machine
Islam et al. [39] Support vector machine
Behmann et al. [40] Support vector machine
Guyot et al. [44] Classification and regression
trees (CART)
Zhang et al. [45] Continuous wavelet analy-
sis (CWA) and Fisher’s
linear discriminant analysis
(FLDA)
Greening, downy and downy 199 images/self Mobile application, other meth-
mildew ods and datasets
Oil palm Nutrient deficiency 420 images/self Implementing further kernel
based systems
Potato Late blight and early blight 300 images/plant village Developing mobile based
application and detection of
disease severity
Barley Drought stress 108 + 204 images/two datasets Working with other crops
Rubber South American leaf blight Self –
(SALB)
Wheat Yellow rust, powdery mildew Self Incorporation with other algo-
and aphid rithm for crop stress identifi-
cation and discrimination
Applications of Computer Vision in Plant Pathology: A Survey

Ma et al. [48] Comprehensive color feature Cucumber Downy mildew 93 images/self Use of convolutional neural
(CCF) and region growing network for pattern recogni-
segmentation tion
Kaur and Kang [49] Support vector machine Multiple Leaf spot Self Working with other networks
and filters
Ali-Shtayeh et al. [53] Rolling circle amplification Squash, watermelon, cucum- Leaf curl virus 178 images/self –
(RCA) and PCR ber
Solahudin et al. [55] Bayesian segmentation Chili Gemini virus 40 images/self –
Padol and Sawant [58] Support vector machine and Grape Downey and powdery mildew 137 images/self Forming the decision support
Artificial neural network system for proper supply of
fungicides
Padol and Yadav [60] Support vector machine and Grape Downey and powdery mildew 137 images/self Working with other algorithms
k-means
Parikh et al. [61] K-nearest neighbour (KNN) Cotton Grey Mildew 190 images/self –
classifier
Phadikar and Goswami [62] Vegetation indices (VI) Rice Brown Spot and blast diseases 100 images/self Adopting the method for other
disease and crops
Prasad et al. [64] k-means – – 297 images/self –
Hu et al. [66] Chan–Vese (C–V) model Wheat Lesion segmentation 55 images/self Real time application
Narmadha and Arulvadivu k-means Paddy Blast, brown spot, narrow Self –
[67] brown spot
Ramakrishnan and Sahaya Backpropagation algorithm Groundnut Cercospora, Cercosporidium 400 images/self Working with other diseases
Anselin Nisha [68] personatum, alternia leaf
blight, phaeoisariopsis
personata

13
623

Table 2  (continued)
References Method
13
Rastogi et al. [69] Artificial neural network and
k-means
Reza et al. [70] Support vector machine
Pires et al. [71] BOVW, SIFT, DSIFT, HOG,
SURF, PHOW
Zhou et al. [72] Orientation code matching
(OCM) and SVM
Rothe and Kshirsagar [73] Active contour model (snakes) Cotton
and feed-forward back
propagation network
Nandhini et al. [74] Compressed sensing and SVM Pomegranate, brinjal, and
tomato
Sabrol and Satish [75] Classification tree
Sannakki et al. [77] k-means and feed forward
neural network
Raza et al. [78] Silhouette extraction and Sta-
tionary wavelet transform
Zhang et al. [80] Super pixel, expectation maxi- Cucumber
mization (EM), pyramid of
histograms of orientation
gradients (PHOG), SVM
Plant Disease
Maple and Hydrangea Leaf spot and leaf scorch
Jute Anthracnose, Black band, die
back, soft rot and stem rot
Soybean Mildew, rust tan, and rust RB
Sugar beet Cercospora leaf spot
Bacterial Blight, Myrothe-
cium and Alternaria
Anthracnose and Alternaria
Alternata, Phytophthora
blight and Alternaria leaf
Spot, Early blight and Sep-
toria leaf
Tomato Late blight, Septoria spot,
bacterial spot, bacterial
canker, tomato leaf curl
Grape Downy mildew and powdery
mildew
Tomato Powdery spots
Scab angular, powdery
mildew,
downy mildew, anthracnose
and scab
624
Dataset/dataset acquisition Future work
28 images Working with real time envi-
ronment
Self Extending the work for both
stem and leaves disease
detection
1200 images/self Evaluation of vocabulary
construction and the feature
coding, early and severity
detection of disease
Self Improvement in training,
disease identification, using
multiple feathers
Self Working with other crops like
wheat, orange, citrus etc.
30 images/self Development of an app and
working with real time deci-
sion support system
383 images/self Applying other methods like
SVM, ANN etc.
33 images/self Detection of anthracnose and
using other classifier like
k-means
984 images/self Working with stereo images
and pooling the 3D informa-
tion with thermal informa-
tion to analyse the effects of
depth, leaf angles and the
amount of incident light on
temperature perceived by the
thermal camera
300 images/self Deploying deep leaning and
introducing inter of things
S. S. Chouhan et al.
 Table 2  (continued)
References Method Plant Disease Dataset/dataset acquisition Future work

Zhang et al. [81] Super-pixel clustering, Apple and cucumber
K-mean clustering and pyra-
mid of histograms of orien-
tation gradients (PHOG)
Zhang et al. [82] Expectation maximization
(EM) algorithm
Prasad et al. [83] Gabor wavelet transform
(GWT) and gray level co-
occurrence matrix (GLCM)
Shrivastava et al. [87] Vegetation indexes
Alternaria leaf spot, mosaic
and rust for apple and
anthracnose, angular leaf
spot and powdery mildew
for cucumber
Cucumber Leaf spot
Multiple Multiple
Soybean Rust, Bacterial Blight, Sudden
Death Syndrome, Brown
Spot, Downy Mildew, and
Frog Eye
150 apple, 150 cucumber
images/self
Self
297 images/self
120 images/self
Improving the segmentation
performance
Working with some other
robust methods
Using augmentation reality in
agriculture, working under
different environmental con-
dition etc.
Working with advanced back-
ground subtraction methods
Applications of Computer Vision in Plant Pathology: A Survey

Shrivastava et al. [88] HIST and WDH Soybean Bacterial Blight, Brown Spot, 347 images/self –
Frog
Eye, Rust and Sudden Death
Syndrome
Huang [91] SVM Sugarcane Borer 166 images/self –
Bai et al. [96] Fuzzy C-means (FCM) Cucumber Leaf spot 129 images/self Working with complex back-
ground details etc.
Li et al. [97] Simple linear iterative cluster- Cotton – 46 images/self Use of unmanned aerial
ing (SLIC) and DBSCAN vehicle, detection of cotton
balls etc.
Atoum et al. [98] Computer vision and super Sugar beet Cercospora leaf spot 306 images/self Working with the other plants
pixel concepts

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626
5 Outcomes
Computer vision techniques has contributed to the great
extent in the field of agricultural growth, monitoring, and
its development. Image processing concepts aims in the bet-
terment of the crop productivity integrating with the compu-
tational intelligence techniques. The collaboration of images
and soft computing techniques adopted in the number of
applications in plant pathology. Disease identification, weed
detection, are some of them. Authors have developed the
number of methods for carrying out this task with higher
accuracy and minimal efforts. In this survey paper we have
focused on surveying the various article that incorporated
the feature of both the digital image processing and soft
computing theories and concepts. We have categorized the
various outcomes from the papers in separate segments like
classification and detection techniques used, the importance
of image and its feature extraction methods, classification of
disease aiming the plant leaf, various projects undergoing,
disease recognizing and controlling methods, databases for
leaf images, future works and applications including smart
or precision agriculture, real-time disease detection prob-
lems and their countermeasures etc. Our aim is to present the
state of the art of all the terms associated with the computer
vision solutions in plant pathology. Therefore we have made
efforts by separating the outcomes into the digital image
processing phases making it easier and convenient for the
authors to work in this domain.
5.1 Image Acquisition
More often it has been observed from the literature that the
authors have worked with the self-generated database. The
images were collected in the real-time environment using
the image capturing devices. The digital cameras are gener-
ally used for this purpose whereas the number of electronics
devices enabled with the cameras are used for this purpose
like mobile phones, drones etc. While some of the authors
have also worked with the database provided by some labo-
ratory or research organization. But when compared then
about eight-five percent of the authors have evaluated their
work by self-attained database. The primary reason for this
is the lack of availability of the benchmark database in this
field. The secondary reason is the choice of the authors
working with different crops and their parts. Therefore the
image acquisition has been performed by the authors them-
selves. The cameras placed in the field acquire the images
based on some criteria depending on the work has to be
performed. The images are then collected at the centralize
server and then processed for further evaluation. The process
of image acquisition also faces some challenges with respect
to the environmental conditions.
13
S. S. Chouhan et al.
5.2 Image Preprocessing
Image preprocessing is related to the enhancement of an
image intended for making it appropriate to perform other
operations. The images collected in the database are more
often real-time images that contain inappropriate informa-
tion like noise, background details etc. So before performing
the classification and feature extraction process the images
are preprocessed for improving the computational accuracy,
efficiency, and minimizing the cost of the system. Some of
the features associated with the preprocessing are given
below
1. Image preprocessing has been performed for reducing
the natural illumination variability effects using the
color constancy methods.
2. Image cropping has been performed for removal of
background and other details from the desired fore-
ground to eliminate the redundant information that
requires high disk storage and utilize CPU time in
segmentation process.
3. Histogram equalization has been performed for
enhancing the quality of an image prior to its cluster-
ing process.
4. Contrast enhancement and signal to noise ratio has
been improved by preprocessing.
5. Images are converted into a single image format and
resizing the images to make them uniform into the
database.
6. Resized images are enhanced using the de-correlation
stretching to exaggerate the difference between color
bands of the image.
7. Removal of Gaussian noise, salt and pepper noise,
white noise, shadow using various filters like low pass,
Gabor, bandpass, cellular automata filter.
8. Clustering of images based upon classes.
9. Transforming the images into the L*a*b or HIS or
HSV color spaces from RGB for increasing the seg-
mentation results.
10. Superpixel clustering to group the neighbor pixel with
the same features in an image into meaningful homog-
enous regions that increase computational efficiency,
running time and memory cost because thousands of
pixels are grouped into only a few hundreds of pixels.
5.3 Image Segmentation
The next step is to find the region of interest from the pre-
processed image. The image segmentation has been per-
formed using the number of approaches generally classified
among two traditional methods and soft computing meth-
ods. Region growing, thresholding is some of the traditional
methods and fuzzy logic, artificial neural network is some of
Applications of Computer Vision in Plant Pathology: A Survey 627
the soft computing methods. The criteria for performing the
task of segmentation more often depends on the authors but
it has been observed that generally, the authors work with
the soft computing methods. The soft computing methods
attain higher accuracy when compared with the traditional
methods for image segmentation. The method like the histo-
gram of intensities, region segmentation based on histogram
analysis has also shown better results. The image segmenta-
tion is performed to identify the regions in the image that
are expected to qualify as the diseased region serving the
preprocessing step for the feature extraction and classifica-
tion. Quite often it has been noticed that the authors have
also involved the human to perform the task of disease seg-
mentation. The results based on some evaluation parameters
like specificity, sensitivity etc. are then compared with the
methods proposed by the authors for evaluating their seg-
mentation performance. But the drawback of these methods
is they are the time-consuming process and costly. This pro-
cess of extracting the region of interest from the image is the
very important task for feature extraction.
5.4 Feature Extraction
Features are the attributes associated with an object that dis-
tinguishes it from the other object. They help in identifying
different objects from and based on them the class label has
been assigned. The features of the object can be shape, size,
color etc. The feature extraction methods in digital image
processing have been classified among two high-level feature
extraction methods and low-level feature extraction methods.
In case of the disease identification generally, the low-level
methods have been used for disease classification. It is the
very critical issue in the leaf disease classification system to
extract the appropriate region of interest. Mostly the authors
have used three attributes of the diseases for extraction they
are i) color, ii) texture, and iii) shape. Based on these three
features the authors have selected the convenient algorithm
for feature extraction. Because how well the feature extrac-
tion strategy is introduced, better the performance of the
algorithm used for the classification. Therefore the choice
of shape, color, and texture is a serious and conjoint issue
because of the similarity of various diseases in their char-
acteristics. Some of the facts related to feature extraction
process that we have seen from the literature have been given
below
1. The key factor of feature extraction is to learn automati-
cally features from the raw data.
2. Texture analysis is related to the surface property of the
object like inverse difference, entropy, contrast, energy,
maximum probability, homogeneity, uniformity, iner-
tia, correlation, the sum of average, the sum of entropy,
the sum of variance, diagonal variance, difference on
variance, difference on entropy, difference on average,
information measures of correlation 1 and information
measures of correlation 2 by using Haralick textures and
Gabor. This can either be calculated by Statistical meth-
ods, Spectral methods, and Structural methods.
3. Shape describes the images according to the contour
of an object. Shape attributes can be measured by area,
eccentricity, centroid, major axis length, minor axis
length, equivalent diameter, perimeter and orientation
based on region properties. Hu’s moment and central
moment are some methods used for this purpose.
4. Color attributes are based on the physical characteris-
tics of the object surfaces because it reflects different
wavelength values. Color is based on color histograms
and color co-occurrence matrix can be mean, standard
deviation. Color features using models like RGB, HSV,
YCbCr, HIS are used for this purpose.
5. More frequently the texture information has been
retrieved by using the Grey level co-occurrence matrix
(GLCM).
6. Depending on the distribution of the local intensity or
edge directions, Histogram of oriented gradients (HOG)
has been used more widely to extract the shapes and
appearance of the diseases.
7. Local binary patterns (LBP) having advantage of invari-
ance to changes in shades of grey and computational
efficiency or mean maximum or variance of the Gauss-
ian weighting function.
8. Some of the other feature selection methods are Rough
set, SIFT, Gabor wavelet, Haar transforms, Hough trans-
forms, Radon transforms, and Pearson correlation coef-
ficient has been used.
5.5 Classification
The last stage for the disease identification using the com-
puter vision methods is classification. The classification is
characterized by the fact that differentiating the one class of
leaf diseased image from the leaf image that is non-diseased.
The task of classification has been performed by using the
number of classification methods available. But more often
the artificial neural network, support vector machine and
k-means clustering have been used for this purpose. The
accuracy of any classification model is depended on the
feature selection and extraction strategy. After the feature
extraction, another important phase begins for training the
classifier using the dataset classified among the diseased
and non-diseased. Both the dataset are then being tested to
check the performance of the classifier for its accuracy. The
frequently used methods like ANN, SVM, and k-means have
their pros and cons, therefore, it is depended on the type of
application for the system has been developed.
13

628
Fig. 6  Database generated percentage
5.6 Discussion
In this article, we have gone through the number of research
article related to the digital image processing methodologies
for plant pathology especially focused on the disease identi-
fication and classification from the plant leaves. The various
findings are presented in the above section separating them
based on the steps of digital image processing. Here in this
part, we have tried to present various discussions related to
the underlying concepts and facts related to computer vision
in automatic plant disease detection.
The first and the foremost query is what plant, which part,
what disease should be considered to work on. Form the
literature it was noticed that almost all plants and their parts
can be affected by one or the other kind of disease. So it’s
not a matter of concern while targeting the plant to work
on. But while choosing the plant it can be kept in mind that
one should choose the plant that is having its environmen-
tal and economic importance. The next part is to select the
disease and specific area of the plant to work on. Mostly
the authors have selected the leaf part of plant but the fruit
and the stem are the other one. Next is the data collection
that can be acquired either from the self-generated real-time
data or selecting the database that is already available. From
the survey it was seen that about 90% of the authors have
worked on the real-time database collected from the field
given in Fig. 6. This data or images have been collected
from the mobile devices or the cameras. The image captured
from these devices have been collected under different envi-
ronmental condition. Then these images have been stored
in some centralized database collection centre for further
processing. The collected database is then processed based
on the image processing techniques and divided among test-
ing and training database. First the images captured are pre-
processed. In this process the images are resized, cropped,
13
S. S. Chouhan et al.
Fig. 7  Classifier usage percentage
removal of noise, adjustment in contrast etc. is performed
for making them uniform. This process helps in improving
the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Image segmentation is the most important phase of
the image processing methodologies. It is the method
of extracting the region or object of interest from the
given image. The objects based on their properties like
color, texture has been extracted from the given image.
The segmentation can be performed using the number of
image segmentation algorithms but here in this article, it
has been observed that region growing and histogram of
features are the two traditional methods that have been
adopted for the disease extraction from the images of the
leaf. Some authors have also worked with the soft com-
puting approaches to achieve the task of segmentation.
By incorporating the soft computing methodologies the
accuracy and performance of the algorithm increase for
disease identification and classification.
The role of feature extractors is another important phase
for disease classification. More often the disease feature
that is selected to be color, texture, and shape. Different
methods and models have been implemented for selecting
the features like color models, GLCM, LBP, and HOG are
used for this purpose.
With the help of the features, the classifiers are then
trained by using the training database. Support vector
machine, artificial neural network, and k-means cluster-
ing are the methods that have been widely adopted for
this purpose. Whereas SVM is the choice of the maxi-
mum number of authors as seen from the comparative
chart shown in Fig. 7. Once the classifier has been trained
the testing database has been used for validating its per-
formance for detecting and classifying the disease from
the plant leaf image. The performance of the algorithms
have been validated by using the parameters like sensitiv-
ity, specificity, accuracy etc. while comparing their results
Applications of Computer Vision in Plant Pathology: A Survey 629
with other approaches. Also, it was seen that some authors
have also validated the performance of their proposed
work with the help of human intervention.
5.7 Problems and Future Applications
There was the number of problems that the authors have
confronted while performing this task. The primary problem
is the availability of the standard database with respect to
the certain diseases and plant. This lack of availability for
the database deflates the researchers and academicians to
carry out their work in this field. Next is the problem of data-
base acquisition. It is very hard and time-consuming task
to gather real-time database from the field under different
atmospheric conditions. Further is the issue of preprocess-
ing of the image the real-time images are present with the
number of invariability like different texture, different back-
ground details, the image capturing angles etc. The selection
of capturing device is another conjoint problem related to
this. Selection of the real field area for acquiring the image,
selection of plant, selection of its disease part, selection of
disease are some of the other problems. The selection of
disease and their symptoms that uniquely identifies or classi-
fies it from the other is another concern that the author must
deal with. Further is the choice of method and concepts for
designing the appropriate system that is better in perfor-
mance, less time consuming and cost-effective.
The number of future applications can be recommended
in order to develop the real-time decision support system for
enhancing the productivity and quality of the plants. Some
of them are use of devices like drone, sensors, high-quality
cameras, developing the web-enabled or internet oriented
system for real-time crop management, use of hyperspec-
tral or remote sensing images for counter measuring the
crops productivity, deploying the technologies like internet
of things in plant pathology, working in collaboration with
artificial intelligence, soft computing, machine learning
algorithms etc.
6 Conclusion
Digital image processing, soft computing methods, internet
of things are the essentials of something that is known to
be Precision or Smart agriculture. So this paper introduces
the various concepts and theories associated with the digital
image processing for disease identification and classification
from the plant leaf images. In this survey paper, we have pre-
sented almost all the state of the art methodologies related
to the image processing in plant pathology. Our intent is
in making the interest of researchers and academicians to
develop and introduce various technologies in this field.
Therefore in this paper, we have discussed stepwise image
processing steps in making the appropriate decision support
system for saving us and the environment.
Compliance with Ethical Standards 
Conflict of interest  On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author
states that there is no conflict of interest.
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