Recognition of brinjal diseases on image processing techniques and Deep

Convolutional Neural Networks

S.Abisha1*

1
Department of Electronics and communication Engineering, Rohini college of Engineering and
Technology, Nagercoil, India

Email:s.abishastephen@gmail.com

Abstract

Farmers and agricultural experts inspect crops such as vegetables, fruits, cereals, and commercial
crops affected by different diseases. But this evaluation process is time-consuming, and
diagnosis is limited by human visual capabilities because initial symptoms are primarily visible
microscopic. Thus, the detection of plant disease at the initial stage is crucial for precision
harvest protection. The purpose of this paper is to present a novel method of identifying and
classifying the infected part of the leaf using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. As part of
the proposed approach, the original plant leaf is first preprocessed by a Gaussian filter in order to
reduce the noise and thus improve the quality and contrast of the image. The affected parts of the
leaf are then separated using FCM and expectation and maximization-based segmentation. In this
approach, the texture, color, and structural features of the images are fused to generate vectors
that represent the features. Finally, DCNN is used to classify images of brinjal leaves according
to their disease type. Experimental results showed that the proposed techniques outperformed
existing methods.

Keywords: Gaussian, Fuzzy C Means, Expectation and Maximization segmentation, Deep

Convolutional Neural Network.

1. Introduction

Agriculture is the backbone of world economy and plays a vital role in the socio-economic
structure in India and in many countries. Trees and plants are fundamental task in preserving the
earth’s ecosystem and atmosphere for a healthy environment. The plant leaf is flat, thin, flattened

1
lateral structure attached to stem and functioning as a principal agent in photosynthesis and
transpiration. Most of the plant diseases/deficiency can be detected by looking at the leaves.
Farmers used to check the plants at a distinct interval and found it difficult to apply fertilizer or
pesticide if they couldn't spot the symptom of a disease. Because the farmers are unable to detect
the actual disease deficiency in vast area, it will have an impact on both the plant and the soil. If
it is discovered earlier, it will minimize the problem and maintain the quality of the crops.
Monitoring the health of the plants across a large region is a crucial activity since it allows for
early diagnosis of nutritional shortages, illnesses, and pests.

In developing countries, the lack of information in identifying specific diseases in plants

complicates the control of various types of plant diseases. According to an Abang et al.
discovered that the farmer knowledge in detecting diseases in Cameroon, Africa, farmers can
identify 21% and 16% of diseases and pests, respectively in plants. Another examination of
farmer knowledge of several illnesses revealed a lack of understanding of biotic stress in crops
and the management of viral illness. As a result, farmers must have sufficient training and hands-
on experience in better disease identification to control infections. However, the lack of
substantial expertise and facilities makes such a vast area impractical. The recent proliferation of
low-cost smart phones among farmers has opened the possibility of identifying illnesses based
on photographs of affected foliage [Chen et al. 2021]. The smartphone camera functions as a
vision sensor, collecting color information in the Red Green spectrum. This data, combined with
machine learning algorithms, used to recognize disease patterns based on visual representation of
the leaves (Wang et al. 2019). Traditionally, symptom aspects have been described by using
mathematical functions and examined for different illness patterns. For identifying different
diseases, these handcrafted characteristics/features are fed into machine learning algorithms such
as Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and others, and the best
features that result in improved accuracy are used. Due to recent advances in computing,
researchers are started working with Deep Learning (DL) algorithms to extract deep features
from the plant leaves to identify various types of diseases or infections. However, DL methods
require large size data for getting more generalized solution and it may not give a higher
accuracy while training with a fewer amount of samples/data. Convolutional Neural Network
(CNN) is mostly used in the literature for disease identification.

2
Investigation was started with various crops such as tomato leaves, grape leaves, corn leaves,
cherry leaves, lemon leaves for identifying different types of diseases from the own datasets.
Many Machine learning techniques have been used for the disease detection and classification,
after the enhancement of Deep learning technique with great potential to increase the accuracy.
So, the specific brinjal crops is chosen, since the brinjal plant is economical and cultivated in
large area in Tamil Nadu and create a dataset for a specific potential disease.
The following are the major contributions:

 We utilized the FCM and EM segmentation algorithm to segment the infected area
from the standard leaf regions.
 We extracted three different types of features namely, color, texture, and structural
features using multiresolution analysis performed through Discrete Shearlet Transform
(DST).
 Developed a Deep Convolutional Neural Network model (DCNN) that detect the
presence and absence of the disease in the brinjal leaves using the DST features.

The organization of the paper is outlined as follows: The literature review is discussed in section
2. The proposed methodology is described in section 3. The description of the experimental
results is provided in section 4. Then the paper conclusion is described in section 5.

2. Related Research Works:

Crop disease detection and recognition is an essential research area because it has the potential to
monitor massive areas of crops in a farming and immediately detect the disease symptoms soon
as they appear on plant leaves. The significant crop loss resulted from a lack of knowledge to
predict the disease at the early stage always leads to poorer agricultural production. As a result,
detecting and assessing crop diseases is an important part of assuring quality of crops (Wu,
2020). Weed detection and recognition in a farming area also play a significant role in
developing intelligent leaf disease diagnosis system. Due to uneven plant spacing, weed
identification in vegetable plantation is more challenging than in crop plantations.

As a result, it's highly essential to develop a fast, efficient, low-cost, and robust method for
detecting crop disease outbreaks (C. J. Chen et al., 2021). Cheng et.al deployed a deep learning

3
algorithm in drones to accurately spray the pesticide in a farming area to prevent diseases in fruit
trees. Recent years, the researchers have started using machine learning (ML) and deep learning
(DL) algorithms to develop a low-cost, computationally efficient weed deduction systems. Deep
Learning methods are mostly preferred than ML methods since DL methods do not require any
separate feature extraction and feature selection module to effectively classify or identify the
weeds.
Concepcion II et al. have utilized different morphological methods to extract different regions in
lettuce leaves and classified using ML algorithms such as Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA),
Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to predict the plant
growth and different types of diseases (Concepcion II et al., 2020). Massi et.al have proposed
serial and hybrid combination of classifiers to classify six types of leaf diseases and damages
using three types of features namely, color, shape and texture extracted from 600 leaf images.
The recognition rate of the hybrid combination is 91.11%, which is greater than the approaches
of serial, parallel, or deep learning separately. Recently, Kurmi et.al have developed a multilayer
perceptron and SVM based crop disease diagnosis system using leaf (tomato, potato and pepper)
images. They have extracted the color features from the leaves and used different gaussian order
functions to discriminate the features based on its characteristics. Finally, they have achieved a
maximum mean classification rate of 94.35% using SVM (Kurmi et al., 2020).

Recently, Sun et.al have developed a novel feature fusion algorithm based on deep neural
networks to detect the maize leaf blight and achieved a maximum precision rate of 91.83% (Sun
et.al, 2020). A deep learning convolutional based neural network (CNN) model has been used to
categorize healthy leaves to identify and analyses leaf sickness. Recently, Konstantinos
Ferentinos has developed different deep neural network models (AlexNet, AlexNetOWTBn,
GoogleNet, Overfeat, and VGG) to 58 different classes of plants and 25 plant species using the
open-source database (87848 images) and achieved a maximum mean detection rate of 99.53%
on unseen images (Ferentinos, 2018). Mohanty et.al have used AlexNet and GoogleLeNet to
identify the leaf diseases of 14 crop spices (mostly from apple, blueberry, cherry, grape, orange,
pepper, etc) using color, gray scale and segmented images and achieved a maximum accuracy of
99.35%. Jin et.al have proposed a CenterNet deep neural network model to effectively identify
the weeds and achieved a maximum precision rate of 95.6% compared to the other conventional
weed detection methods. In their method, it mainly focuses on plant identification, minimizing

4
the handling of multiple plant species. This technique can also increase plant identification
accuracy and performance by lowering the number of trained dataset and even the complex of
weed identification (Jin et al., 2021).

Zhou et.al have proposed a restructured residual dense network (RRDN) to identify the tomato
leaf diseases. The Hybrid deep learning model combines the deep residual network as well as the
deep dense network. Thereby, the proposed required lesser number of training parameters,
computationally efficient, and reported a maximum mean detection rate of 95% compared to the
state-of-the-art deep learning methods (Zhou et al., 2021). Xie.et.al, have developed a graph leaf
diseases data based and proposed a real-time leaf disease detection algorithm using DR-IACNN
to detect four different types of diseases (Mites, Black rot, Leaf blight and Black measles) in
grape leaves. The proposed deep learning model reported a maximum precision rate of 81.1%
with the detection speed of 15 FPS (Xie et al., 2020). Krishnaswamy et.al have investigated
different types of DNNs such as VGG16, VGG19, GoogleNet, ResNet101 and DenseNet201 to
distinguish seven different types of leaf diseases such as Tobacco Mosaic Virus TMV, Little leaf
disease, Epilachna beetle, Two-spotted spider mite, Cercosopora leaf spot, Brown spot, Citrus
hindu mite, Citrus canker, yellow vein mosaic virus, and Leaf hopper and achieved a maximum
mean detection rate of 90% using VGG16 (Krishnaswamy et al. 2020).

In a recent work, Anagnostis et.al have utilized FFT to extract the features from a Anthrocnose
fungal disease leaves and classified the diseases using different types of DNN (VGG16,
DensNet121, ResNet50, ad Inceptionv3, customized CNN). Finally, they achieved a maximum
disease recognition rate of 99% using their customized CNN (Anagnostis et.al, 2020). Recently,
fifteen types of diseases from three major crops (tomato, potato, and peeper) have been detected
using CNN. The authors have used different optimizer functions in CNN and achieved a
maximum detection rate of 98% (Labhsetwar et.al, 2021). Hyper spectrum acquisition
approaches and applications have proven useful in enhancing agricultural output and practices by
offering farmers and food management with critical data on the factors affecting crop quality and
growth. This technology is frequently used in smart agriculture (Ang et.al, 2021). Karimanzira et
al. proposed the notion of designing an intelligent aquaponics system that incorporates predictive
analysis, system optimization, and anomaly detection to maximize commercial aquaponics
productivity through early defect detection (Karimanzira et al., 2021). Guan et.al have developed
four different types of DNNs (VGG19, VGG16, Inception-v3, and ResNet50) to classify the
5
disease severity levels on apple plants and achieved a maximum classification rate of 90.9%
using VGG16 network to classify the leaf diseases into healthy, early, middle, and end stage.
Most recently, Poornima et.al have developed explainable vision transformer-based CNN to
diagnose the plant diseases of three plants namely apple, maize, and rice and achieved a
maximum disease recognition rate of 93.55%, 92.59%, and 98.33%, respectively (Poornima
et.al, 2022). Most of the researchers have investigated the leaf diseases from tomato, black
pepper, apple, maize, and potato crops and very few research works have considered the brinjal
leaf diseases. In addition, they have utilized the open-source databases and the images are mostly
taken under a constrained environment. Specifically, most of the earlier works have utilized the
full leaf image and have not used segmented image to precisely develop a model to identify
different types of diseases.

3. Proposed Methodology
This section discusses the proposed methodology of brinjal leaf disease detection using DCNN.
3.1 Experimental Settings and Data Description:
In Eggplant, among various types of diseases, five diseases are the most common, and it severely
affects the brinjal plant. The leaf collected from the brinjal plant has been captured from different
farms located in the Northern part (Hosur) and southern part of Tamil Nadu (Panakudi,
Valliyoor, and Nagercoil), and Kerala (Kollam, Neyyattinkara) in India. The brinjal leaf images
were acquired in a natural environment with adequate natural lighting. These leaves were
examined by a well-experienced expert in the Agricultural College and Research Institute located
in Killikulam, Tamilnadu, and categorized the brinjal leaves into the five major types of diseases
using microscopic investigation. The complete description of the total number of images in each
class is given in Table 1 and sample images are shown in Figure 1.

Table 1: Details of leaf database

S.No Types of leaf disease Total no of Classes

images
1. Healthy leaves (Normal) 400 Healthy (400)
2. Pseudomonas solanacearum 220 Infected (1100)
3. Cercospora solani 220

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 4. Alterneria melongenea 230
5. Pythium aphanidermatum 150
6. Tobacco Mosaic Virus 280

(A) (B) (C) (D) (E) (F)

Figure 1: (A) Normal leaf (B) Pseudomonas solanacearum, (C) Cercospora solani, (D)
Alternaria melongenea, (E) Pythium aphanidermatum and (F) Tobacco Mosaic Virus

In this work, we have used the Nikon Digital camera Z5 kit with Nikkor Z 24 - 200 mm f/4-6.3
lens to capture the leaf images with a pixel resolution of 3840 × 2160. The images captured by
the camera are stored in a memory and transferred to the personal computer for processing
images. The computing system used for identifying the leaf diseases utilizes the 12 th generation
Intel core i7-12700H processor with 32GB of RAM. MATLAB 2020a software is used to
implement the image processing and deep learning algorithm for leaf disease detection. The
recognition of brinjal leaf disease comprises five separate phases: 1) Preprocessing 2) Image
Segmentation 3) Image Fusion 4) Feature Extraction, and 5) Classification as shown in Figure 2.
Initially, the leaves are collected from the brinjal plant and images are preprocessed to remove
the noise from the captured leaf images. Figure 2 shows the five different phases in the proposed
leaf disease diagnosis system.

7
 Input Image

Image Denoising Preprocessing

FCM segmentation EM segmentation

Segmented Image Segmented Image

Image Decomposition (DST)

HFB LFB LFB HFB

Median Fusion rule Image Fusion

Median Fusion rule

Fused wavelet coefficients

Inverse DST

Fused image

Color Texture Structural Feature

Extraction

DCNN

Pseudomonas Cercospora Alternariam Tobacco Pythiumaphani

solanacearum solani elongenea Mosaic dermatum
Virus

Figure 2.The proposed methodology to diagnose the brinjal leaf diseases.

8
3.2 Image Preprocessing

Preprocessing of the acquired leaf images is important for extracting meaningful

information about the different types of leaf diseases. In this work, the Nikon camera is used to
capture the leaf images and the images are saved in RGB space. Hence, the leaves are mostly
affected by Gaussian noise because of the high amplification applied to the blue color passage
compared to the other colors such as green and red color. The Wiener filter works effectively in
removing the Gaussian noise or additive white noise to remove the blur present in the leaf by
varying the noise density level and the filtered images will be highly useful for disease
identification. The general equation for the wiener filter by restored image R ( u , v ) is given
below,

R ( u , v )=W ( u , v ) . Rr (u , v)

Here Rr (u , v ) is the received image, W ( u , v ) is the image spectrum for wiener filter. It is
many employed for the linearization of the blurred affected image [Muhammad Aqeel Aslam et
al 2020]. In addition, it also prevents any sharp boundaries, and high smoothing even in the vein
of the leaf .

3.3 Image Segmentation

The image segmentation process is used to segment the pre-processed leaf images into
smaller parts using image segmentation methods. In this work, the unsupervised image
segmentation methods namely Fuzzy C Means (FCM) clustering, and Expectation Maximization
(EM) segmentation are used to segment the color images based on their pixel values [Abisha].

3.3.1 Fuzzy C Means Segmentation (FCM)

FCM is a clustering technique with one piece of data to represent two or more clusters based on
producing an optimal partition by minimizing the weighted sum of squared error objective
function with a different membership value between 0 and 1. This FCM algorithm allocates each
data point corresponding to each center by means of calculating the distance between the cluster
center and the data point in the region. The fuzzy clustering is based on centroids of clusters and
decomposition as shown in Figure 3.

9
 Figure 3. Representation of cluster center [9]

FCM clustering algorithm is demonstrated below:

[1] Initially, select a partition of the fuzzy set of M objects into the N cluster by M*N
membership matrix of object ai in cluster bi with ON [0,1].

[2] Once iteration happens, cluster centers and membership ON are updated using the
equation given by
c n
O N =∑ ∑ c ij eij (1)
m

i=1 j=1

[3] Calculate the Euclidean distance i th data point and j th cluster center using this
equation,
2
e ij =‖ai−b i‖ (2)

2
e kj =‖a k −b j‖ (3)

[4] Using the membership matrix, the fuzzy criterion function is given by the weighted
sum of the squared error criterion function as
n
1
b i= ∑ c mij aij (4 )
ni j=1
n
Where ni =∑ c ij (5)
m

j=1

[5] Update the fuzzy membership function V affording cij. When eij>0, then

(∑ )
n 2 −1
eij m−1
c ij = (6)
k=i ekj

10
 [6] Repeat the previous step by incrementing t, until |c ij (t )−cij ( t−1 )|>£ .

Where t is the next pixel in the membership matrix, £ is an error.

The FCM-based segmentation is completely an unsupervised method, and it fully eliminates the
noisy spots. Indeed, it does not require any prior information for segmenting the infected part of
the leaf and there is no apparent distortion or change after segmentation.

3.3.2 Expectation Maximization (EM) Method

Expectation Maximization is an iterative method based on a model approach to determine the

local maxima region by using the maximum likelihood estimate parameter. Mathematically, each
region can be represented by a parametric distribution, like a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM).

3.3.2.1 Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)

Gaussian Mixture Model is a density-based model with a large number of component

distributions. These distributions are used to represent a specific region to provide a multimodal
density-based image. All points of data are considered as one-dimensional vector measurement
in the preprocessed image X ={ x 1 , x 2 , … . , x j , …. , x n }, the Gaussian density is calculated using the
parameters such as means, and covariance matrix is given by:

Where μk is the mean,ε k ( x−μk ) is the covariance matrix.

−1

In the Gaussian mixture-based model, the probability distribution density for the leaf is given in
equation (8),
k
p ( x j /θ ) =∑ a k ( x j∨¿ φ k )(8) ¿
k=1

Where a k is the mixture weight based on the prior probability of the leaf image. If the Gaussian
components is too low, then the variability of the images are unable to handle. In contrast, if the
K value is too large, the GMM final model will be too complex. So GMM is used with the help
of the density based model and achieved good results at K=10 Gaussian components.

11
3.4 Discrete Shearlet Transform Based Image Fusion

DST is used to extract the features from segmented leaf images. Discrete Shearlet
Transform is one of most computationally efficient method used to perform multiresolution
analysis (MRA) on a multidimensional signal. It has a unique characteristic to perform
directional transformation at multiscale levels and the features extracted from different levels of
DST transformation on an image.

The DST achieves optimal sparse approximations by the Shearlet parameters a , the shear
parameter S and the translation parameter tr . (Wang et al., 2012). The optimal sparse
approximation is calculated by analyzing the elements φ x : a>0 , S ∈γ ,tr ∈γ 2. The basic model
for the image fusion based on DST is shown in the Figure 4. The Shearlet is based on 4*4
decomposition and multiresolution technique by applying the pyramid transform. Then, the
feature vectors are computed from the decomposed image of the brinjal leaf.

Figure 4. Image fusion based on discrete Shearlet transform.

The matrix M a can be written as

M a=S a Pa (9)

Where, Sa is the matrix shear and P x is the parabolic related to scaling matrix.

12
Sa = (10 1s )(10)
and

Pa= (b0 √0b ) (11)

The function based on Shearlet Transform is

ST =⟨ f , φ x ⟩ (12)

In DST, the first step is used to decompose the segmented image by pyramid transform
into different coefficient based on scales and direction. These coefficients are then fused using
medium fusion rule followed by inverse discrete shearlet transform. For calculating the
coefficient of median value, 3*3 window is taken from the coefficient. Then, these coefficients
are sorted based on numerical values and the middle value is taken as the median. After
calculating, the median values, for all the coefficient in segmented leaf images. Coefficient
having greater absolute difference is estimated from the median value. In the same way, all the
coefficients of the fused leaf image are achieved.

3.5 Image classification

Radial Basis Function Neural Network and Deep Convolutional Neural Network models
are demonstrated for classifying various types of diseases. Different features such as Contrast,
Correlation, Energy, Homogeneity, Mean, Standard Deviation, Skewness, Asymmetry, Border,
Irregularity, Color and Diameter are collected from the fused image and given as the input to the
neural network.

3.5.1 Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN)

Radial Basis Function Neural Network consists of three layers such as input layer, hidden
radial basis layer of neurons and output linear layer of neurons. Each node is connected to the
previous neighborhood layer. The input variables are assigned based on the features taken from
the fused images to each and every node. The hidden nodes are activated by the transfer function

13
of Radial Basis function (RBF). In RBFNN, number of hidden nodes based on the activation
function is shown in the Figure 5.

Figure 5. Structure of Radial Basis Function Neural Network.

The input layer is operated with each neuron produced an input weight equal to the

distance between input and weighted vector observed as ‖Dist‖. Each input neurons are element

to element product by its input weight and its bias. Each output layer is operated based on the

activation function. During network training phase, the parameter associated with the activation

function are optimized by the actual training features value. When the training vector are

considered as the accurate or nonstochastic, then the linear combination of RBF’s is assigned to

be error free during the training phase. The method of fitting Radial Basis function is according

to the distance weighted regression. The RBF is represented by the equal number of basis

function with each training points. Furthermore, each input neuron are serves as the center for

each basis function. In order to maintain the smooth operation for desired output, each kernel’s

width must take the training points into account.

3.5.2 Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN)

Deep Convolutional Neural Network for image recognition is based on each neuron
arranges by overlapping regions in the feature vector. In deep learning, the CNN is very robust

14
and sensitive to each feature present in the leaf images. The typical CNN has several layers
starting with a) convolutional level b) max pooling level c) Optimizer level d) Dropout level e)
Completely connected level, and f) Classification level. We tested several types of DCNN with
different number of layers. Finally, the eight layer DCNN architecture gives a best accuracy in
classifying the leaf diseases. Hence, we have proposed a eight layer CNN for brinjal leaf disease
classification. The result from the completely connected layer has 5-way SoftMax function for
five classes (leaf diseases). Then, three consecutive convolution layers tracked by a maxpool
layer are used to make the feature clearer and increase the accuracy of the classification. Each
convolutional and fully connected layer is followed by a ReLU layer to make the training phase
of the infected area faster. The input image was resized to the dimension of 256×256 (RGB) and
convolved with 3×3 convolutional filter and dropout layers, and then it is given as the input to
the fully connected layer with 1500 neurons. Then, these 1500 neurons are used to make
predictions using SoftMax functions. The convolution operation is carried out with two functions
and considered real number as the arguments. The convolution operation is defined as the

c ( t ) =∫ y ( a ) z ( t−a ) da (13)
In deep learning models, the input is taken as a multidimensional vector where I is the input
image and K is the two-dimensional kernel. The discrete operation for the convolution can be
represented in terms of the mathematical expression as

s ( i, j ) =( I∗K ) (i , j )=∑ ∑ I ( i−w , j−u ) K ( w , u ) (14)

m n

In this work, we have utilized the AlexNet for classifying the leaf diseases. Because this network
has been trained with larger size image data of different classes. The first five layers are used for
convolutional operation and the remaining three layers are connected at the end of the neural
network for the classification of different types of diseases. Table 2. shows parameter described
in Deep Convolution Neural Network
Table 2. Parameter used in DCNN for training
Parameter Values
Number of layers 8
Number of input 1500
Number of output 5

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 Activation function SoftMax
Convolution filter size 3 ×3
Number of epochs 30-50
Learning rate 0.01-0.0001

4. Results and Discussion

In this work, totally 1500 leaf images were collected from different part of the region in the state
of Tamilnadu in India. The image of the affected various diseases such as bacterial, fungal, and
viral disease are shown in Figure 6. Then the images are resized to 256×256 resolutions to
minimize the computational complexity and computational time.

(A) (B) (C) (D) (E) (F)

Figure 6. (A) Normal leaf (B) Pesudomonas solanacearum (C) Cercospora solani (D)
Alternaria melongenea (E) Pythium aphanidermatum and (F) Tobacco Mosaic Virus

To detect the presence of a diseases (discontinuity) and to extract edge with good orientation for
retaining the essential information regarding the shapes of infected part of the leaf, the
preprocessed images are then subjected to FCM clustering algorithm and EM segmentation for
Pesudomonas solanacearum, Cercospora solani, Alternaria melongenea, Pythium
aphanidermatum and Tobacco Mosaic Virus as shown in Figure 7 and 8.

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Figure 7. Fuzzy C Means clustering for brinjal leaf (a) Pseudomonas solanacearum (b)
Cercospora solani (c) Alternaria melongenea (d) Pythium aphanidermatum (e) Tobacco Mosaic
Virus.

Fi
gure 8. Expectation Maximization segmentation for brinjal leaf (a) Pseudomonas solanacearum
(b) Cercospora solani (c) Alternaria melongenea (d) Pythium aphanidermatum (e) Tobacco
Mosaic Virus.

The Discrete Shearlet Transform (DST) gives better visual quality results when compared to
other transformations [Ashish Khare]. This is due to the fact that the discrete wavelet transform
(DWT) based method suffers due to artifacts, reduced contrast and blurring problems. The
discrete Shearlet Transform based fusion methods show good visual quality in images, as shown
in Figure 9.

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Figure 9. Image fusion based on Discrete Shearlet Transform (a) Pseudomonas solanacearum (b)
Cercospora solani (c) Alternaria melongenea (d) Pythium aphanidermatum (e) Tobacco Mosaic
Virus.

The quality of the fused images was analyzed by considering the performance matrices such as
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM). PSNR is a
measure of image quality based on pixel difference between the segmented image and fused
image is given by
2
e
PSNR=10 log ( 15 )
MSE

where,
A −1 B−1
1
MSE= ∑ ∑
AB a=0 b =0
2
e (a ,b) (16)

Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) is a way for predicting, perceived quality of fused
infected image which depends upon the computation of local mean and standard deviation are
computed by using the formula as given below:

(2 μ A μB )(2 σ A σ B )
SSIM = (17)
( μ 2A + μ2B )(σ 2A +σ 2B )
where the mean value can be calculated by using this formula
N
1
μA=
N
∑ Ai (18)
i=0

N
1
μ B= ∑ B (19)
N i=0 i

Where the standard deviation value can be calculated by using this formula

√
N
1
N∑
2
σ A= (A ¿ ¿ i−μ A )2 ¿ (20)
i=1

√
N
1
∑ (B ¿ ¿i−μ B )2 ¿ (21)
2
σ B=
N i=1

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It is worth mentioning that the structural similarity index measure improved when there is more
dissimilar image between fused image and segmented image. This means that, SSIM became
high, whenever original image affectedly segmented. Consequently, PSNR is used to measures
the quality of fused image and implies high for the fused image nearly equal to the segmented
image with clear vision. The PSNR and SSIM obtained for different images are shown in Tables
3.

Table 3. PSNR and SSIM for leaf image.

PSNR SSIM
Diseases FCM EM Fused FCM EM Fused
image image
Pseudomonas solanacearum 11.2 20.28 32.56 0.54 0.62 0.72
Cercosporasolani 11.5 20.1 37.45 0.6 0.65 0.78
Alternariamelongenea 10.96 20.7 32.89 0.52 0.63 0.73
Pythiumaphanidermatum 10.98 20.54 38.02 0.59 0.65 0.81
Tobacco Mosaic Virus 10.32 19.54 40.72 0.5 0.69 0.79

The different types of features like structural, color and texture features are taken from the
segmented leaf images and the fused images. Table 4 represent the value of various set of
features extracted from the image before and after fusion. The following 4 features are
computed from the leaf images to assess the performance of DST: (i) Contrast (ii) Correlation
(iii) Energy, and (iv) homogeneity [Abisha].

Table 4. Texture features of brinjal leaf images before and after fusion using DST

Before fusion
Features Pseudomonas Cercospor Alternaria Pythium Tobacco
solanacearu asolani melongenea aphanidermatum Mosaic Virus
m
Contrast 0. 623 0.492 0.478 0.467 0.582
Correlation 0.9937 0.9884 0.9899 0.9912 0.9913
Energy 0.489 0.4467 0.4823 0.4345 0.4812
Homogeneity 0.9634 0.9824 0.9825 0.9832 0.9801
After fusion

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 Contrast 0.683 0.583 0.517 0.692 0.613
Correlation 0.9912 0.9956 0.9924 0.9634 0.9934
Energy 0.562 0.724 0.475 0.527 0.573
Homogeneity 0.992 0.999 0.943 0.967 0.972

From Table 4, it is noticed that contrast features provide low value for the leaf with
Pseudomonas solanacearum disease and a value greater than ‘1’ for the remaining diseases. The
correlation ranges low value for the leaf images with Cercosporasolani, whereas higher value of
energy for the leaf images with Pythiumaphanidermatum disease. The value of Homogeneity
provides low value for the leaf images with Alterneriamelongenea and the leaf images with
Tobacco Mosaic Virus in terms of energy. Then, the color features such as mean, standard
deviation and skewness features are extracted on the color-based features in RGB leaf images as
shown in Table 5. [Abisha]

Table 5. Color features of brinjal leaf images before and after fusion using DST

Methods Before fusion

Mean Standard Skewness
Deviation
Pseudomonas solanacearum 126.34 68.23 -1.34
Cercospora solani 136.34 66.34 -1.18
Alterneria melongenea 143.23 65.24 -0.92
Tobacco Mosaic Virus 136.23 68.34 -0.64
Pythium aphanidermatum 124.67 81.34 -0.26
After fusion
Pseudomonas solanacearum 142.78 70.67 -0.54
Cercospor asolani 154.23 69.56 -0.63
Alterneria melongenea 163.76 70.23 -0.34
Tobacco Mosaic Virus 154.76 73.67 -0.21
Pythium aphanidermatum 185.67 84.56 -0.14

From Table 5, it is noticed that the color features obtained from the DST fusion image gives
better results when compared to segmented results also the clarity is improved when the

20
skewness value is decreased and standard deviation is increased in the fusion image. The feature
based on structural data give relevant information related to scope of the infected region of the
leaf. Structural features (asymmetry, border irregularity, color, and diameter) are obtained for
fused image and segmented image as shown in Table 6 (Abisha).

Table 6. Structural features based on DST

Features Before fusion

Pseudomonas Cercospora Alternaria Pythium Tobacco
solanacearum solani melongenea aphanidermatum Mosaic
Virus
Asymmetry 4.32 2.79 2.46 7.33 3.67
Border 0.18 0.31 0.15 0.25 0.64
Irregularity
Color 1.75 1.95 1.79 2.59 2.87
Diameter 5.79 3.55 7.67 4.36 3.46
After fusion
Asymmetry 6.79 4.68 5.35 5.87 5.79
Border 0.08 0.07 0.06 0.09 0.11
Irregularity
Color 2.65 2.52 1.35 3.58 2.46
Diameter 6.34 4.25 8.35 5.87 4.85

From the experimental results, it is highly evident that, the DST based fusion methods
show better results and it shows notable improvement in the spectral and spatial information
compared with other wavelet transforms in leaf disease detection [Ashish Khare]. Finally, we
have used the feature vector contains combined features such as textural, color and structural
features to classify the leaf diseases and normal using Deep Neural Networks (DNN). These
combined features are given as input to the neural network for automatic leaf disease detection.
The network was trained with 75% of the images and the remaining 25% images are used for
testing. Table 7. shows the distribution of images into training and testing.

Table 7. Distribution of leaf images used in classification

S.N Types of leaf disease Total no of Trainin Testing

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 o images g Images
Images
1. Healthy leaves (Normal) 400 300 100
2. Pseudomonas 220 165 55
solanacearum
3. Cercospora solani 220 165 55
4. Alterneria melongenea 230 172 58
5. Pythium aphanidermatum 150 112 38
6. Tobacco Mosaic Virus 280 210 70

As Figure 10 (a) shows the number of samples in validation process during its training phase

and Figure 10 (b) shows the best validation performance matrix in the deep convolutional neural

network is shown below.

(a) (b)

Figure. 10. (a) Validate the number of samples with trained images (b) Best validation
performance.

The performance of the DNNs in identifying the leaf diseases was assessed through four
performance measures namely, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and accuracy.

22
 TP
Sensitivity= ( 22 )
( TP+ FP )

TN
Specificity= (23)
( TN + FP )
FP
Precision= ( 24 )
( TN + FP )

TP+TN
Accuracy= (25)
(TP+ FP +TN + FN )

Here, FP refers the false positive, TP refers the true positive, TN refers the true negative,
and FN refers the false negative. In Figure 11 shows the performance analysis of Radial Basis
Function based Neural Network and Deep Convolutional Neural Network based on with fusion
and without fusion.

RBFNN
Performance Analysis of Classifiers (WF)
RBFNN (F)
100
90
Classification accuracy in %

80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Sensitivity Specificity Precision Accuracy
Performance measures

Figure 11. Performance analysis of the classifiers

As shown in the figure 11, the performance analysis for the Deep Convolutional Neural
Network is greater than the existing Radial Basis Function Neural Network by these 4
parameters. Also Specificity, Sensitivity and precision for FBFNN and DCNN is compared with
fusion and without fusion. The DCNN with fusion attained the maximum accuracy of 99.18%
when compared to the DCNN without fusion.

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 5. Conclusions

This study proposes an automated method for the detection of diseases in plants using
image processing techniques and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. The collected images
are preprocessed using the Gaussian filtering method. This improves the quality of the leaf
image, and further segmentation techniques are applied to separate defective portions of the leaf
image. Based on the DCNN, the features are extracted from every leaf and classified according
to the corresponding disease. In comparison with the other ANN methodologies, the projected
system showed better sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. In the future, mobile apps can be
developed as well as pocket-sized devices that can be used to analyze vast areas without
requiring expert knowledge within the required time interval.

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