Ecological Informatics 71 (2022) 101774

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Ecological Informatics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolinf

Application of thermal and visible imaging to estimate stripe rust disease

severity in wheat using supervised image classification methods
RN Singh a, b, Prameela Krishnan a, *, Vaibhav Kumar Singh c, Koushik Banerjee d
a
Division of Agricultural Physics, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi 110012, India
b
ICAR-National Institute of Abiotic Stress Management, Baramati, 413115 Pune, Maharashtra, India
c
Division of Plant Pathology, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi 110012, India
d
ICAR-Mahatma Gandhi Integrated Farming Research Institute, Piprakothi, Motihari Bihar 845429, India

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Reliable and accurate estimation of plant disease severity at the field scale is a key factor for predicting yield
Thermal image losses, disease management and food security. A field experiment was designed and conducted during 2017–18
Visible image and 2018–19 with 24 wheat cultivars to estimate the stripe rust severity by supervised classification of thermal
Wheat stripe rust
and visible images using parallelepiped, minimum distance, mahalanobis distance, maximum likelihood, support
Image classification
vector machine and neural network methods of image classification. Results demonstrated the potential of
thermal and visible imaging techniques to estimate wheat stripe rust severity with good accuracy. For both
visible and thermal images used in this study, support vector machine gave the best estimates of the rust severity,
while the parallelepiped method was the worst-performing method. Support vector machine and neural network
methods showed d-index, Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency and coefficient of determination values above 85%, with
accuracies above 98% and kappa coefficient above 0.97 for both thermal and visible images. Comparison of
thermal and visible image classification performance revealed that for all the methods except support vector
machine, the estimated rust severity, overall accuracy and kappa coefficient of thermal images were better than
visible images. The present study clearly showed that both thermal and visible image analysis can be applied as a
rapid non-destructive technique to estimate the wheat rust severity under field conditions. The study also pro­
vided a comparative insight into thermal and visible image classification methods that have great potential for
sustainable plant disease management in modern agriculture.

1. Introduction
Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is one of the most important crops of
global economic importance. Worldwide, wheat is the largest cultivated
crop, grown over an area of about 225 mha with a total production of
around 772.64 mt and a productivity of 3.25 t/ha (FAO, 2020). Wheat
provides a cheap source of protein (20%) and calorie (19%) intake from
consumption (Ramadas et al., 2020). Being a staple food and serving the
needs of the majority of the poor population of the world, wheat holds
special importance for global food security and to fulfill the needs of the
growing population, by 2050 its demand is expected to rise by 60% (Su
et al., 2019). India is the second-largest producer of wheat in the world,
contributing by about 13.5% to the world wheat production (FAO,
2020).
However, wheat production in India is often challenged by various
biotic and abiotic stressors which seriously endangers its productivity.
Among the pests and diseases, worldwide, the stripe (or yellow) rust of
wheat, caused by Puccinia striiformis f.sp. tritici, is one of the most serious
disease responsible for significant yield losses in wheat (Chen, 2014).
The losses in yield due to stripe rust have been estimated to be 10–70%,
while during severe epidemic, the grain damage could be as much as
100% (Chen, 2005). A global yield loss of about 5.5 MT per year was
estimated due to wheat stripe rust (Beddow et al., 2015). Therefore,
timely and effective control of wheat yellow rust is of paramount
importance for ensuring sustainable global productivity and food secu­
rity. Accurate monitoring of wheat rust is the key for effective disease
control and to minimize the resulting losses. Conventional methods of
severity estimation in the field needs visual inspection from trained
experts. The calendar-based pesticide control of crop diseases had major
limitations of the subjectivity of investigators leading to the excessive

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: prameelakrishnan@yahoo.com (P. Krishnan).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2022.101774
Received 8 June 2022; Received in revised form 10 August 2022; Accepted 10 August 2022
Available online 13 August 2022
1574-9541/© 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
R. Singh et al.
use of chemicals (Moshou et al., 2004) along with high labor cost in
monitoring crops. Nowadays, considering the above limitations, as a
pre-requisite for precise disease control in agricultural crops, re­
searchers are focusing on non-destructive crop monitoring using various
platforms (Ang and Lew, 2022).
Thermal imaging has been used to detect many biotic and abiotic
stressors like drought, salinity, high & low temperature etc. (Pineda
et al., 2020). Many researchers have used thermal imaging to detect
plant diseases (Esmaeili et al., 2017; Al Masri et al., 2017; Yang et al.,
2019; Cohen et al., 2021). In a greenhouse study during the disease
incubation period, Zhu et al. (2018), used thermal image derived
maximum temperature difference (MTD) of leaf and whole plant to
characterize tomato mosaic and wheat leaf rust diseases. They observed
a difference of up to 2 ◦ C in canopy mean temperature along with its
increasing values with the disease progression. Vetal (2017) used visible
images to detect early blight, septoria leaf spot, bacterial spot and iron
chlorosis of tomato with 93.75% accuracy using image segmentation
and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm. Shrivastava and Pradhan
(2021) used pre-trained deep convolutional neural network for feature
extraction and SVM as classifier to detect and classify rice blast, bacterial
leaf blight and sheath blight of rice with an accuracy of 91%. Under
Indian conditions, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Neural Network
(NN), K- Nearest Neighbours (KNN) and Convolutional Neural Network
(CNN) classifications of visible images were used by several researchers
for detecting diseases in crops like sugarcane, citrus, potato, soybean,
tea, cucumber, pomegranate, groundnut etc. with accuracies of >90%
(Shruthi et al., 2019). By applying a series of deep convolutional neural
networks, Wang et al. (2017) used RGB images of apple black rot in the
PlantVillage dataset and estimated four levels of disease severity with an
overall accuracy of 90.4%.
The studies available till now in literature for wheat stripe rust were
mostly based on visible images and focused mainly on identifying the
disease and differentiating it from the healthy plant parts like single leaf
or single plant. Though field-level studies were performed for moni­
toring plant diseases using remote sensing in the different regions of the
electromagnetic spectrum, no field-level studies were found in the
literature on the use of thermal region for estimating wheat stripe rust
severity as per Cobb’s scale. Most thermal imaging studies for moni­
toring crop diseases were performed under controlled environmental
conditions, which may not be applicable under open field conditions
(Singh et al., 2020a). Similarly, most of the image analysis-based studies
were performed only to detect diseased and non-diseased regions in the
plant canopy area. Hence, the main purpose of this study is to apply the
image-based analysis not only to detect but also to estimate or grade
different levels of severity in the wheat rust disease under field condi­
tion. Researchers and agricultural field managers generally estimate the
rust disease in wheat crop field, conventionally by a standard rust
severity scale (Cobb’s Scale) (Peterson et al., 1948). This is based on
visual scoring, and hence it is subjected to an individual’s judgment. In
our experiment, we have attempted to grade the severity of wheat yel­
low rust in field using image analysis. The novelty of the present study is
that, this is the first investigation to estimate Cobb’s scale-based scoring
of stripe rust severity under field conditions using image analysis. Thus,
the present study was planned with an objective to assess the use of
thermal and visible images to estimate different levels of stripe rust
severity in wheat under field conditions using various supervised image
classification methods. Our work has a distinction from previous studies
in terms of concurrent use of thermal and visible images for estimating
different levels of disease severity of wheat stripe rust using image
classification methods under field conditions.
2. Material and methods
2.1. Study site and treatment details
Field experiments were conducted under artificial epiphytotic
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Ecological Informatics 71 (2022) 101774
conditions at Wheat Rusts Pathology Experiment Farm belonging to
ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, for two years
during 2017–18 and 2018–19 rabi seasons. Geographically, the experi­
mental farms at ICAR-IARI, New Delhi was located at 28◦ 40′ 23´´North
latitude and 77◦ 13′ 27′′ East longitude with an altitude of 228.61 m
above the mean sea level (MSL). The climate of the experimental site
was semi-arid with dry, hot summer and dry winter. The wheat crop
season (rabi) was from mid-week of November to the first week of April.
The soil at the experimental site was non-calcareous and slightly alka­
line in nature, classified under the major group of Indo-Gangetic allu­
vium (Typic Haplustepts).
Twenty-four wheat cultivars, having different levels of disease
resistance and susceptibility, were sown in plots of 6.25 m2 (2.5 × 2.5 m)
with row-to-row distance of 25 cm. The sowing of each cultivar was
done on 24th November 2017 and 25th November 2018 in each rabi
seasons of 2017–18 and 2018–19, respectively. The recommended
agronomic package and practices were strictly followed to maintain the
uniform crop stand. The plots of the experimental block were sur­
rounded by 2 rows of the mixture of highly susceptible wheat cultivars
(Local Red, Agra Local, and A-9-30-1) to provide high and uniform
disease pressure in the field. The urediospores inoculum with a mixture
of six virulent and most predominant pathotypes of P. striiformis tritici
(47S103, 46S119, 110S119, 78S84, 110S84 and 238S119) were used for
creating artificial epiphytotic conditions in field. The susceptible
infector rows were artificially injected with water containing uredio­
spores suspension (106 spores/ml) using syringes. Spray inoculation to
susceptible infector rows was also carried out with urediospore’s sus­
pension prepared by mixing spore dust in water with few drops of tween-
20 and was sprayed on infector rows through hand sprayer in the eve­
ning time during the last week of December each year. Disease severity
and infection type was recorded at weekly intervals and final disease
severity (FDS) was taken for stripe rust on 8th & 4th of March during
2017–18 and 2018–19, respectively. Recording of disease severity was
started when susceptible checks showed 25–30% severity in individual
cultivar/ plot in all the replications according to the modified Cobb’s
scale (Peterson et al., 1948), based on the severity of rust infection (%) in
wheat. The constant of infection for different categories were considered
as 0.2, 0.4, 0.8 and 1.0 for resistant (R), moderately resistant (MR),
moderately susceptible (MS) and susceptible (S) reactions, respectively,
based on Roelfs (1992). The coefficient of infection (CI) was calculated
by multiplying rust disease severity with constant values of infection
type (Stubbs et al., 1986). Using the final disease severity and coefficient
of infection, the 24 wheat cultivars were classified into four different
categories (Table 1) such as high (<20), moderate (21–40), low (41–60)
and susceptible (>60) (Singh et al., 2020b).
2.2. Thermal and visible imaging for estimating rust severity
Thermal and visible images were taken simultaneously, with a hand
held and robust camera (Testo 890–1), which supports high-quality
wide-angle lens of 42◦ × 32◦ . It had a thermal sensitivity (NETD) of
<40 mK at 30 ◦ C (86 ◦ F), the minimum focusing distance - 0.1 m, geo­
metric resolution (IFOV) -1.13 mrad (standard lens) with emissivity set
at 0.95. It was sensitive to the spectral range of 8 mm and 14 mm and
could estimate temperatures from - 20 to 100 ◦ C with an accuracy of
±2%. The image available in BMT format could be transformed into
other image formats like .bmp, .jpeg, .png, .csv, and .xls. The camera had
a focal plane array type of detector and produced an image of 640 × 480
pixels.
Both the thermal and visible images were taken on three different
dates in each year coinciding with jointing to booting, booting to
heading and heading to flowering stage of crop growth, from nadir view
angle at about 13.30–14.30 IST, when the crop plants were under the
maximum day temperature and less windy condition. Since the crop
canopy had a high emissivity (0.95) and very low reflectivity (0.25)
(Costa et al., 2013), the background reflectance was not considered in
R. Singh et al. Ecological Informatics 71 (2022) 101774

Table 1 functioning (Mijwel, 2018).

List of wheat cultivars considered in this study.
S. Category Cultivars Final rust Coefficient of 2.4. Post classification
No. (Based on disease severity infection
severity and (%) (%) The classified images were further processed using clumping and
susceptibility to wheat
sieving methods to obtain less noisy image. Sieving was performed to
rust)
remove the isolated pixels; it investigated the neighboring 4 to 8 pixels
1 High PDW 314 1 0.2 to determine whether all the pixels were grouped or classified into the
2 High WH 1124 1 0.2
3 High DBW 90 1 0.2
correct section or not. If the number of the pixel for a specific class that
4 High HD 3086 3 1.1 was grouped as assigned was less than that being classified, the corre­
5 High PDW 291 7.5 3 sponding pixels were then removed. Clumping was performed to add
6 High HS 507 10 4 spatial coherency to the existing classes by combining the similar
7 High VL 907 12.5 5
adjacent areas (Xie et al., 2008). At first, a dilate operation was con­
8 High VL 829 15 12
9 High HI 1563 20 16 ducted on the classified image for clumping the classes together. Then,
10 High HD 3043 20 16 the erode operation was done to finalize the post-classification
11 High PBW 644 20 20 processing.
12 High Raj 4083 20 20
13 Moderate HPW 349 25 21.5
14 Moderate HD 2932 25 25
2.5. Disease severity from the image classification
15 Moderate WH 1105 35 25
16 Moderate DBW 88 35 35 The canopy cover map obtained from the classified image showed
17 Moderate HS 375 40 40 four (or less) different classification units, such as healthy leaf, diseased
18 Moderate HD 3059 40 40
leaf, shaded leaf and soil, depending upon cultivar, growth stage and
19 Low HPW 251 45 45
20 Low HD 2967 55 55 illumination condition at the time of image acquisition. Since the
21 Low PBW 590 55 55 contribution of shaded leaf and soil classes were very less (<10%), the
22 Susceptible HS 240 80 80 percentage coverage of healthy leaf and diseased leaf classes along with
23 Susceptible PBW 343 85 85 the number of pixels employed in these classes were obtained. The
24 Susceptible A-9-30-1 97.5 97.5
percentage of these two classes (healthy and diseased leaf) were added
and considered as 100 to calculate the effective percentage area of the
this study. Thermal and visible images were taken at three different disease and healthy leaf. Finally, the diseased area estimated through
locations in each plot from a height of 1 m above the canopy during a severity scores of Cobb’s scale and those estimated from the thermal and
particular crop growth stage. visible images by all the six image classification methods were analyzed
statistically.

2.3. Image classification using ENVI 2.6. Statistical analysis to assess the image estimated disease severity

The thermal and visible images of the diseased plots were classified
using supervised classification methods in ENVI 4.8 software (Lillesand
et al., 2015). The region of interests (ROIs) of different classes were
generated in every image manually for each class. We created two sets of
regions of interests (ROI’s) in every image for each class. The first set,
which is approximately 70% of the total ROI’s is used for classification
(training), while the other 30% of ROI(s), which are created based on
visual observations in field, are used for accuracy assessment (valida­
tion). Supervised image classification algorithms, including the paral­
lelepiped (PLD), minimum distance (MID), mahalanobis distance
(MAD), maximum likelihood (MXL), support vector machine (SVM) and
neural network (NN) methods were used for image classification in the
present study. The MID uses the mean Euclidean distance of each class
for classification, it is mathematically simple and computationally effi­
cient, but it is insensitive to variance in spectral response data (Lillesand
et al., 2015). The MAD works similarly as MID, but uses a less complex
mahalanobis distance, which is simpler to calculate than Euclidean
distance (Gao, 2009). The MXL classifier uses the probability density
function for classification of a pixel by computing the probability of
unknown pixel belonging to a category. Though it is the most popular,
MXL is computationally intensive and needs normal data as input, which
may not always be true (Deval and Joshi, 2022). The Support Vector
Machine uses a hyperplane for creating the decision boundaries with
maximum margin to produce higher classification accuracy (Pal and
Mather, 2005). SVM is a non-parametric method with greater general­
ization capacities and performs well even when the training data is
limited (Song et al., 2012). SVM is popular because of its superiority to
conventional classifiers and is almost equivalent to ANN and decision
trees (Huang et al., 2002). The NN has the distinction from the above
methods in its ability to learn by itself to produce output with minimum
error. However, NN suffers a major limitation of unexplained
To assess the performance of image estimated disease severity from
the image classification (estimated) and the actual observed percent
disease as per Cobb’s scale (observed), the most widely used statistical
efficiency calculations including the mean biased error (MBE), per­
centage bias (PBIAS) (Moriasi et al., 2007), coefficient of determination
(R2) (Moriasi et al., 2007), root mean square error (RMSE) (Moriasi
et al., 2007), Willmott index of agreement (d-index) (Willmott, 1981)
and Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) (Nash and Sutcliffe, 1970) were used
in this study as goodness of fit parameters.
2.7. Classification accuracy assessment
Confusion matrix was used to assess the accuracy of different clas­
sification methods applied for classifying the images, following the
methodology described in Fig. 1. The pixel that had been classified and
categorized in different classes from the thermal or visible image was
compared to the actual crop canopy in the field and the accuracy
assessment of each class in the image and the overall accuracy were
provided. Producer’s accuracy (PA), user’s accuracy (UA) and overall
accuracy were determined using the confusion matrix function of ENVI.
The kappa coefficient (K), which denotes the degree to which the per­
centage correct estimations of a confusion matrix due to “genuine”
agreement versus “chance” agreement was made, was also calculated. K
ranged from 0 (worst) to 1 (best) (Banerjee et al., 2018).
3. Results
3.1. Disease estimation using visual observation
In this study, the 24 wheat cultivars were classified into four classes
(High, Moderate, Low and Susceptible) based on the disease occurrence

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R. Singh et al. Ecological Informatics 71 (2022) 101774

Thermal and visible image

24 wheat cultivars with different stripe rust severity

Supervised Image classification in ENVI

(PLD, MID, MAD, MXL, SVM, NN)

Post Classificaon
Clumping and Sieving

Estimation of stripe rust severity

Statistical analysis Accuracy assessment of image classification methods

using estimated and observed stripe rust severity using Confusion matrix

MBE, RMSE, d-index, Producer's and User's accuracy,

NSE, PBIAS and R2 Overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient

Fig. 1. Flow diagram describing the methodology followed in this study.

and their potential effects in terms of their rust severity scores. Higher
the score, higher is the negative impact of the disease on crop growth
and yield. The final rust severity (%) and coefficient of infection (%) of
wheat cultivars varied within the range of 1–20, 21–40, 41–60 and
60–100, which were classified as high, moderate, low and susceptible
categories, respectively (Singh et al., 2020b). Table 1 reveal the final
rust severity score and coefficient of infection, which indicate the plant
response to the rust disease for all 24 cultivars.
The average disease severity progress of the cultivars during the crop
growth under high, moderate, low and susceptible categories for both
years were depicted in Fig. 2. During both the years, the disease severity
showed increasing trends after inoculation and at any given stage the
average rust severity of cultivars remained the highest in the susceptible
cultivars, followed by low, moderate and high resistance. At the time of
first observation (62 DAS in 2017–18 and 66 DAS in 2018–19), the
average rust severity was zero in high and moderately resistant cultivars.
The maximum final rust severity scores in 2017–18 (recorded at 104
DAS) were 20, 40, 60 and 100, while in 2018–19 (recorded at 99 DAS),
they were 20, 40, 50 and 95 for high, moderate, low and susceptible
categories, respectively.
3.2. Disease estimation from thermal and visible images using different
image classification methods
Thermal images of different cultivars with varying stripe rust disease
severity levels showed significant differences in the temperature distri­
bution as well as in the overall temperature of the wheat crop canopy.
Irrespective of the crop growth stages, the mean canopy temperature
increased with increasing disease severity as observed in the represen­
tative visible and thermal image given in Fig. 3. The frequency distri­
bution of the temperature in the thermal image of the wheat field
showed significant differences under healthy and diseased conditions
(Fig. 4).
The diseased leaf showed more frequency distribution in the high
temperature region on the extreme left of the frequency distribution
curve (Fig. 4). A representative image of rust affected wheat crop, with
selection of region of interests (ROI) using thermal and visible images is
presented in Fig. 5. The parallelepiped, mahalanobis distance and
maximum likelihood classifiers used in this study were considered
without any thresholding to classify all the pixels of the image. The
hyperparameters of support vector machine and neural network
methods were fixed after assessment of the overall accuracy (> 95%)

Fig. 2. Progress of wheat rust severity in high (H), moderate (M), low (L) and susceptible (S) cultivars (Dashed line: individual cultivar, Solid line: average of all
cultivars of that group).

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R. Singh et al. Ecological Informatics 71 (2022) 101774

Fig. 3. Representative images of wheat crop (a) visible and (b) thermal Images.

Min. 14.8 °C, Max. 18.3 °C, Avg. 16.6 °C

(a)

Min. 16.5 °C, Max. 16.8 °C, Avg. 16.7 °C Min. 17.1 °C, Max. 17.7 °C, Avg. 17.5 °C
(b) (c)

% %

Fig. 4. Representative temperature distribution of the (a) whole thermal image of wheat plot and the processed images of (b) healthy and (c) diseased (rust affected)
wheat leaves.

and kappa coefficient (> 0.95) from the confusion matrix. While using
the support vector machine classifier, we considered radial basis func­
tion (RBF) kernel with gamma and penalty parameters set at 0.33 and
100, respectively. The pyramid levels were set at 0 and we did not use
any thresholding here in order to avoid unclassified pixels. For neural
network classifier, we used logistic (sigmoid) activation with 3 hidden
layers and 1000 iterations. The training parameters including training
threshold contribution, rate, momentum and RMS exit criteria were set
at 0.9, 0.2, 0.9, and 0.1, respectively. The supervised image
classification based on six different methods like (a) Parallelepiped
(PLD), (b) Minimum distance (MID), (c) Mahalanobis distance (MAD),
(d) Maximum likelihood (MXL), (e) Support Vector Machine (SVM) and
(f) Neural network (NN) (Fig. 6) revealed that both the thermal and
visible images were able to capture the rust affected wheat crop in the
field. The distinction between the diseased and the healthy leaf was not
significantly apparent in the thermal images as in the visible classified
images. However, certain classification methods were able to do better
classification after adjusting their respective classification parameters.

5
R. Singh et al.
Fig. 5. Selection of region of interest in (a) visible image and (b) thermal image.
( : Healthy leaves; : Diseased (wheat rust) leaves; or : Canopy shadow).
Nevertheless, a significant correlation was derived between the
observed disease severity (Cobb’s scale), and the image-derived disease
severity from both thermal and visible images.
The category-wise analysis, based on R2 values indicate that, in the
case of high resistant cultivars, SVM (R2 = 0.87) and MXL (R2 = 0.50)
methods performed the best for visible and thermal images, respectively.
Similarly, for moderately resistant cultivars, the performance of the SVM
was the best for visible (R2 = 0.93) and that of NN for thermal (R2 =
0.75) images. For the low resistant cultivars, SVM was the best in both
visible (R2 = 0.92) and thermal (R2 = 0.85) image classifications.
In case of susceptible cultivars, SVM (R2 = 0.87) was the best for
visible image classification, however, both SVM and NN performed
equally well (R2 = 0.84) in case of thermal image. The overall perfor­
mance was estimated for the rust severity from pooled data for all the 24
wheat cultivars considered in this study for two years in both the ther­
mal and visible images (Table 2). The SVM and NN performed the best
and were at par with each other with an R2 value of 0.91, followed by
MXL (R2 = 0.86), MAD (R2 = 0.80), MID (R2 = 0.76) and PLD (R2 =
0.69) methods (Figs. 7 and 8). However, SVM performed the best with
the visible images with R2 = 0.95, followed by NN (R2 = 0.86), MXL (R2
= 0.78), MAD (R2 = 0.65), PLD (R2 = 0.31), and MID (R2 = 0.22). In
general, based on R2 values of the two years pooled data, classification of
the thermal image to detect rust disease in wheat were better than the
visible image in all the image classification methods tested in this study,
except for SVM. Thus, the different disease severity levels of wheat rust
were well characterized using both the thermal and visible images.
3.3. Statistical analysis to assess and compare the image estimated wheat
rust disease severity by different classification methods
In order to understand the performance of the image classification
methods to exclusively categorize the rust disease in wheat cultivars,
into highly resistant, moderately resistant, low resistant and susceptible
categories, we have statistically analyzed and compared their perfor­
mance exclusively in these categories by evaluating with the observed
Cobb’s scale based disease severity data. The MBE, RMSE, d-index, NSE,
PBIAS and R2 values of different supervised image classification
methods for both thermal and visible images (Table 3-6) with the
observed wheat rust disease severity based on Cobb’s scale, showed that
highly resistant cultivars had poor statistical parameters and only few of
them were in the acceptable range. SVM performed well only with
visible images with NSE value of 0.85, while in the rest of the cases, both
thermal and visible images had poor NSE values. The highest d-index
was observed in SVM and NN methods for visible and thermal images,
respectively. Similarly, the lowest d-index was observed in PLD and
MAD, for visible and thermal image analysis, respectively. Based on the
compared values of MBE, RMSE, d-index and NSE, it can be observed
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Ecological Informatics 71 (2022) 101774
that in high resistant cultivars, visible images performed better than
thermal images using SVM and NN image classification methods.
For moderate resistant cultivars (Table 4), RMSE, d-index and NSE
values showed that SVM classification performed the best in both ther­
mal and visible images for estimating stripe rust severity in wheat cul­
tivars. The values of RMSE, d-index and NSE revealed that for SVM and
MAD classifications, visible images performed better than thermal,
while the reverse was observed in NN, MXL, MID and PLD classifica­
tions. In case of low resistant category (Table 5), again the SVM per­
formed the best for both thermal and visible images followed by NN
classification. The thermal images gave better results than visible images
under SVM, MXL, MAD, MID and PLD classification methods, while in
case of NN, thermal images had better values of RMSE, d-index and NSE.
In the susceptible category (Table 6), results similar to low resistant
cultivars were obtained, except for the fact that PLD classification per­
formed better in visible than in thermal image analysis.
Though the trends of statistical data in the category-wise analysis of
different classification methods with visible and thermal images were
varying in nature, a more uniform and better statistics was observed for
pooled data of cultivars among all the categories. Under pooled data
analysis of all cultivars, the NSE, d-index and RMSE clearly showed the
best performance of SVM, while the parallelepiped was the poorest
performer for both visible and thermal image analysis. However, in case
of thermal images the NSE and d-index of NN was at par with that of
SVM. In general, the rest of the methods showed a similar trend of NSE,
d-index and RMSE for both thermal and visible images with better
performance of MXL followed by MAD and MID. Visible image analysis
had the values of NSE, d-index and RMSE between − 1.51- 0.95,
0.62–0.99, and 5.3–38.78, respectively, while in case of thermal image,
they varied from 0.52 -0.90, 0.97–0.87 and 7.88–17.06, respectively.
The RMSE, d-index, and NSE values for NN, MXL, MAD, MID and PLD
classification methods were higher in the thermal than visible image
classification. This indicated that with the pooled data analysis, the
performance of thermal images was better than visible images in all,
except for the SVM method.
3.4. Accuracy assessment of image classification methods to categorize
rust disease in wheat
The classification accuracy of each classification method for both the
thermal and visible images was calculated and compared using the error
matrix (Table 7). In the case of visible images, SVM performed the best
with an overall accuracy and kappa coefficient values of 99.41% and
0.987, respectively. The producer’s, user’s and overall accuracies of
MAD, MXL, SVM and NN methods were above 90%. The kappa co­
efficients of these methods were also above 0.90. In general, it was
observed that, PLD was the worst performer with an overall accuracy
R. Singh et al. Ecological Informatics 71 (2022) 101774

Fig. 6. Representative thermal and visible image classified using different image classification methods ( Healthy leaves, Diseased (wheat rust) leaves,
Canopy shadow, Unclassified).

Table 2
Evaluation of rust disease severity estimates of the wheat crop canopy from the thermal and visible image analyses using different image classification methods for
pooled data of all the 24 cultivars for both the years.
Image classification methods MBE RMSE d-index NSE PBIAS R2

Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal

PLD − 25.56 9.89 38.78 17.06 0.62 0.87 − 1.51 0.52 101.50 − 36.90 0.31 0.69
MID − 4.31 4.14 22.75 12.95 0.66 0.91 0.14 0.72 17.10 − 15.40 0.22 0.76
MAD 4.79 2.45 15.39 11.72 0.86 0.94 0.60 0.77 − 19.00 − 9.10 0.65 0.80
MXL − 6.45 − 0.61 14.65 9.62 0.92 0.96 0.64 0.85 25.60 2.30 0.78 0.86
SVM 0.13 2.94 5.30 7.88 0.99 0.97 0.95 0.90 − 0.50 − 11.00 0.95 0.91
NN 0.67 3.18 9.10 7.96 0.96 0.97 0.86 0.90 − 2.70 − 11.90 0.86 0.91

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R. Singh et al. Ecological Informatics 71 (2022) 101774

Fig. 7. Overall performance of the different image classification methods for detecting wheat rust disease severity from visible image. (a) Parallelepiped, (b)
Minimum distance, (c) Mahalanobis distance, (d) Maximum likelihood, (e) Support vcetor machine, (f) Neural network.

and kappa coefficient values of 68.43% and 0.434, respectively.
Thermal images also revealed the best performance with SVM with
an overall accuracy and kappa coefficient values of 98.89% and 0.981,
respectively. However, the values of overall accuracy and kappa co­
efficients were only marginally higher than NN and MXL methods. In
general, the producer’s accuracy, user’s accuracy and overall accuracy
of all the classification methods were above 90%. The kappa coefficients
were also above 0.95 for all the methods except PLD, whose kappa co­
efficient was 0.828. Thermal image analysis showed PLD as the poor
performer with an overall accuracy and kappa coefficient values of
91.99% and 0.828, respectively. In general, the trends of the perfor­
mance of all the methods in both thermal and visible images were the
same viz. SVM > NN > MXL > MAD>MID > PLD. However, under MID
and PLD methods, the thermal images showed significantly higher
overall efficiencies and kappa coefficient values than visible images.
4. Discussion
Quantification of yellow rust severity is a crucial task for sustainable
agriculture and site-specific disease management in wheat. The yellow
rust disease is associated with certain changes in pigments, water status
and temperature of the crop, which consequently alters the visible
appearance and canopy temperature. Therefore, non-destructive quan­
tification of yellow rust by using thermal and visible images is promising

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R. Singh et al. Ecological Informatics 71 (2022) 101774

Fig. 8. Overall performance of different image classification methods for detecting wheat rust disease severity from thermal image (a) Parallelepiped, (b) Minimum
distance, (c) Mahalanobis distance, (d) Maximum likelihood, (e) Support vector machine, (f) Neural network.

Table 3
Evaluation of rust disease severity estimates of the wheat crop canopy from the thermal and visible image analyses using different Image classification methods for high
resistant cultivars.
Image classification methods MBE RMSE d-index NSE PBIAS R2

Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal

PLD − 31.75 4.79 44.13 7.22 0.25 0.64 − 41.29 − 0.28 364.60 − 50.10 0.26 0.30
MID − 17.19 − 1.62 21.42 9.28 0.41 0.61 − 8.96 − 1.12 197.40 16.90 0.21 0.20
MAD − 3.91 − 0.44 8.92 9.68 0.71 0.53 − 0.73 − 1.31 44.90 4.60 0.36 0.13
MXL − 4.94 − 0.83 11.20 5.52 0.67 0.83 − 1.72 0.25 56.70 8.70 0.44 0.50
SVM − 0.78 0.82 2.67 6.35 0.96 0.73 0.85 0.01 8.90 − 8.60 0.87 0.30
NN − 0.60 0.66 4.99 6.18 0.88 0.77 0.46 0.06 6.90 − 6.90 0.62 0.36

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R. Singh et al. Ecological Informatics 71 (2022) 101774

Table 4
Evaluation of rust disease severity estimates of the wheat crop canopy from the thermal and visible image analyses using different image classification methods for
moderate resistant cultivars.
Image classification methods MBE RMSE d-index NSE PBIAS R2

Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal

PLD − 30.07 7.54 40.83 16.81 0.46 0.66 − 8.56 − 0.72 153.00 − 35.70 0.42 0.24
MID − 4.96 2.91 13.96 8.61 0.70 0.88 − 0.12 0.55 25.20 − 13.80 0.28 0.64
MAD 3.75 3.03 9.87 12.10 0.83 0.79 0.44 0.11 − 19.10 − 14.30 0.54 0.45
MXL − 9.45 − 1.43 15.00 10.30 0.80 0.87 − 0.29 0.35 48.10 6.80 0.66 0.63
SVM − 1.51 3.46 3.85 7.32 0.98 0.91 0.92 0.67 7.70 − 16.40 0.93 0.75
NN − 2.74 4.15 9.89 7.53 0.88 0.90 0.44 0.65 13.90 − 19.60 0.66 0.76

Table 5
Evaluation of rust disease severity estimates of the wheat crop canopy from the thermal and visible image analyses using different Image classification methods for low
resistant cultivars.
Image classification methods MBE RMSE d-index NSE PBIAS R2

Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal

PLD − 24.37 20.40 32.86 24.03 0.54 0.58 − 3.91 0.58 64.50 − 54.00 0.42 0.37
MID 0.08 9.42 23.89 15.43 0.37 0.72 − 1.59 − 0.08 − 0.20 − 24.90 0.01 0.38
MAD 10.46 4.86 17.78 11.55 0.63 0.87 − 0.44 0.39 − 27.70 − 12.90 0.22 0.62
MXL − 7.15 − 3.12 19.48 12.11 0.72 0.87 − 0.72 0.33 18.90 8.30 0.39 0.67
SVM 0.72 3.11 4.13 6.55 0.98 0.95 0.92 0.81 − 1.90 − 8.20 0.92 0.85
NN 1.13 4.03 7.46 7.31 0.95 0.93 0.75 0.76 − 3.00 − 10.70 0.84 0.83

Table 6
Evaluation of rust disease severity estimates of the wheat crop canopy from the thermal and visible image analyses using different Image classification methods for
susceptible cultivars.
Image classification methods MBE RMSE d-index NSE PBIAS R2

Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal Visible Thermal

PLD − 0.47 17.14 18.84 29.66 0.86 0.68 0.05 − 1.36 0.70 − 24.50 0.70 0.37
MID 29.05 16.25 35.48 21.56 0.55 0.76 − 2.38 − 0.25 − 41.50 − 23.20 0.23 0.58
MAD 25.79 7.03 29.57 15.24 0.68 0.89 − 1.35 0.38 − 36.80 − 10.00 0.65 0.78
MXL − 4.23 4.77 16.82 12.89 0.85 0.90 0.24 0.55 6.00 − 6.80 0.59 0.71
SVM 5.27 7.95 11.15 12.21 0.93 0.91 0.67 0.60 − 7.50 − 11.40 0.84 0.84
NN 10.47 7.76 15.64 12.09 0.89 0.92 0.34 0.61 − 15.00 − 11.10 0.87 0.84

Table 7
Accuracy evaluation of wheat rust diseased and healthy area classification by six different supervised image classification methods, based on the average values of the
pooled data for all the 24 wheat cultivars for two years.
Image classification methods Visible Thermal

Disease Healthy Pooled Disease Healthy Pooled

PA UA PA UA Overall Kappa PA UA PA UA Overall Kappa

PLD 89.90 60.59 52.86 64.41 68.43 0.4349 90.90 94.93 92.57 95.58 91.99 0.8284
MID 78.45 72.12 83.56 85.25 82.85 0.6715 96.79 96.66 99.01 97.91 97.63 0.9528
MAD 94.30 92.92 97.16 96.59 96.45 0.9318 96.62 96.82 98.91 98.74 97.80 0.9563
MXL 98.15 96.68 97.79 99.11 98.44 0.9667 97.93 97.46 99.24 99.41 98.60 0.9749
SVM 98.66 98.52 99.33 98.75 99.41 0.9879 97.24 98.39 100 99.62 98.89 0.9809
NN 96.07 96.30 97.30 98.36 98.77 0.9730 97.22 98.47 99.69 99.55 98.56 0.9787

PA: Producer’s Accuracy, UA: User’s Accuracy.

due to the substantially reduced labour cost and potential of image
analysis for applications under field conditions. The present study pro­
vided strong evidence for not only detecting the disease but also for
characterizing the severity of wheat rust using both visible and thermal
images. The visible image-based severity assessment was on the basis of
the color differences, while that of the thermal image was based on the
temperature differences in healthy and diseased leaves. The visible im­
ages gave better accuracy for rust severity estimation with SVM, NN and
MXL classifiers, but in case of MAD, MID and PLD classification methods
the accuracy was poor when compared to thermal images.
In this study, we have adopted six different supervised classification
methods to characterize wheat rust severity. The logic behind selecting
the supervised classification method was the prior knowledge of the
region of interests, thus by using the supervised methods the chances of
error was more reduced than unsupervised classification (Lillesand
et al., 2000). Moreover, the unsupervised classification method is
preferred only in cases where the number of classes is large, and the
ground truth data is not available. In the present study, the image
classification was performed not only to detect the plant disease, but
also to estimate the extent to which the disease had affected the crop.
Most of the past studies had employed image classification methods for
disease detection and monitoring using visible images only, while in this
study we have used thermal images also, even though thermal images
are limited to the study of temperature measurements of target areas.
Krishnakumar and Narayanan (2019) measured the severity of malady
spots in cucumber leaf using the SVM and NN classification of visible

10
R. Singh et al.
images and found both to be satisfactory, but had not assessed the ac­
curacy of the disease estimation. Vamsidhar et al. (2019) also used SVM
and NN to identify and classify the images of Alternaria, Anthracnose,
Bacterial Blight, Cercospora Leaf Spot, Bacterial leaf spot, frog eye leaf
spot and sun burn disease with an accuracy of above 85%. Yang et al.
(2015) using airborne multispectral image estimated the cotton root rot
affected area using six supervised classification methods, including MID,
MAD, MXL, SAM, NN and SVM. They found, all the six methods to be
effective for identification and mapping of cotton root rot in field, with
an overall accuracy for image classification of above 90% and Kappa
coefficient of above 0.85. Chen et al. (2018) used satellite-based mul­
tispectral images to classify wheat rust using SVM and Random Forest
methods and reported an accuracy ranging from 90 to 95%. Su et al.
(2018) used UAV-based multispectral images and random forest method
to classify wheat rust in field with an identification accuracy of 89.3%.
Mattupalli et al. (2018) used the maximum likelihood classifier to
evaluate the impact of phymatotrichopsis root rot infested areas in an
alfalfa field, they reported an accuracy ranging from 90 –96% from
unmanned-aircraft acquired RGB images and 95–100% accuracy for
manned-aircraft-acquired RGB images.
To the best of our knowledge, there is almost no literature to
compare the results of our thermal image classification and 3 classifiers
including MAD, MID and PLD. However, the statistical parameters for
assessment of the goodness of fit of these methods were comparable and
even better than visible images in few cases. Among the six supervised
classification methods used in this study, the support vector machine
method performed the best, while the parallelepiped method performed
the worst for estimating wheat rust severity in both the thermal and
visible images. The SVM also showed the highest overall accuracy with
high kappa coefficient. There was a strong agreement between the
classification result and training data in classifying thermal and visible
images to estimate leaf rust severity. Both the overall accuracy and the
kappa coefficient were found to be minimum with the parallelepiped
method, for both thermal and visible images.
In the present study, the non-parametric SVM classifier was identi­
fied as the best method for the wheat rust disease severity estimation
from visible and thermal image classification. As the diseased and non-
diseased areas were evidently different in appearance, finding the hy­
perplane would have been relatively easy for the SVM, which could have
been the reason for good classification with little complications for
different levels of wheat rust severity (Azlah et al., 2019). In this study,
the NN was also a competent classifier, with its feed-forward back
propagation working principle, it had resolved the diseased and non-
diseased classification of wheat rust severity with an accuracy of
above 98%, which was on par with the SVM. Similar results were
observed by Chanda and Biswas (2019) in identification and classifica­
tion of different plant diseases. Pujari et al. (2016) in their study on
wheat rust identification using visible images have also reported better
performance of SVM over NN. However, for detecting blight in potato,
Patil et al. (2017) observed that NN performed better than SVM. The
detection of plant leaf diseases with over 90% accuracy using SVM and
NN were reported by several researchers (Al Bashish et al., 2010; de
Luna et al., 2017; Waghmare et al., 2016).
In general, the maximum misinterpretation in this study was re­
ported in the parallelepiped method, as it uses a simple decision rule and
the classification based on standard deviation threshold from the mean
class. Thus the overlapping of the point clouds of diseased and healthy
leaf, in the feature space of parallelepiped method might have resulted
in the poor grouping of pixels resulting in their lowest accuracy and
modelling efficiency (Banerjee et al., 2018). Similarly, in this study, the
overall classification accuracy and kappa coefficient of the maximum
likelihood method was also close to those of the neural network and
support vector machine method. This might be due to the fact that the
parametric maximum likelihood method calculates the mean vector and
covariance matrix for each class of the training dataset for classifying the
disease and healthy leaves (Li et al., 2014).
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Ecological Informatics 71 (2022) 101774
Being a parametric approach, the MAD method had a strong
dependence on the normal distribution of the dataset and hence gave a
lower overall accuracy than SVM, NN and MXL (Al-Ahmadi and Al-
Hames, 2009). The MAD gave a better prediction and modelling effi­
ciency, for characterizing wheat rust severity in both thermal and visible
images, relative to the MID method. In the prediction of the rust severity
using thermal image, the performance of MID was marginally low, but in
case of visible image the statistical performance of MID was drastically
reduced, as evident from the d-index, NSE, RMSE, PBIAS and R2 values.
Similar observations were made with the overall accuracy and kappa
coefficient by these two methods. (Table 7). These results were as ex­
pected as MAD is a direction-sensitive classifier similar to that of MXL,
except that it considers the equal covariances of each class, while the
MID is a simplistic method using mean of the Euclidean distance in the
discriminating function and does not take into account the variability of
classes (Campbell and Wynne, 2011). Similar order of performance of
MXL, MAD and MID were also reported by Al-Ahmadi and Al-Hames
(2009) for assessment of land use land cover change, where these
models gave 80, 74 and 67% of average accuracy, respectively.
Banerjee et al. (2018) in their study to estimate leaf area index by
classifying leaf and soil area reported similar findings of SVM and PLD
performing best and worst, respectively. However, the accuracy re­
ported by all methods including SVM, MXL, MAD, MID and PLD were
above 95%, which was slightly better than our finding because their
region of interest was plant and soil, which showed very distinct dif­
ferences in both thermal and visible images, while differentiating fea­
tures within the plant leaf as observed in the present study. The
limitation of image-based disease classification resides in the fact that
illumination, wind, air temperature and crop microclimate influence the
images, which may affect the sensitivity of the image to capture the
disease severity. We minimized these effects by taking observations at
time when air temperature was maximum under a clear sky with less
windy conditions and avoided observations during wet conditions like
rainfall or irrigation. Apart from this, the vertical distribution of the
disease severity is difficult to assess in the images, especially in the
visible images as compared to thermal images. Thermal image monitors
the temperature profile in the whole canopy, where the changes in the
vertical profile is also captured to an extent. This might have added for
the better performances of thermal images in most of the classification
methods than visible images. Hence, the small differences between the
observed and estimated wheat rust disease severity could be attributed
to this. Thus, from the present study, it can be inferred that the wheat
stripe rust severity can not only be characterized using image classifi­
cation of both thermal and visible images, but also their severity could
be scored based on Cobb’s scale under field conditions using image
analysis. Irrespective of classification methods, except SVM, thermal
images gave better estimation and accuracy of rust severity than the
visible image. In general, SVM performed better for visible than thermal
images. Among the different methods of classification tested in this
study, SVM, NN and MXL were the top three methods to be recom­
mended for characterizing wheat rust severity. Future research can be
focused on image classification with more time series images during the
growth period of plant disease to acquire more accuracy with large
dataset. In addition, capability of deep learning and transfer learning
methods can also be explored to analyze and deepen the understandings
of the stripe rust severity in wheat.
5. Conclusions
This study examined the potential of the thermal and visible image
analysis to estimate wheat stripe rust severity in 24 cultivars with
varying rust severity (0–100%) under field conditions using different
supervised image classification methods. From the results of this study,
we conclude that: (a) both thermal and visible imaging can be used (with
SVM, NN and MXL classification) not only to identify but also to effec­
tively estimate stripe rust severity with good accuracy under in-situ field
R. Singh et al.
conditions in wheat crop. (b) NN, MXL, MAD, MID and PLD methods
gave better estimates with the thermal images than visible images. (c)
Among the six image classification methods tested in this study, SVM
gave the best estimation of wheat stripe rust severity with both thermal
and visible images.
Data availability statement
Data supporting the findings of this study are available from the
corresponding author on reasonable request.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
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