Design of Plant Leaf Diseases Detection System employing IoT
Varun Katoch, Karan Verma, Shruti Jain*
2023 International Conference on Computer, Electronics & Electrical Engineering & their Applications (IC2E3) | 979-8-3503-3800-3/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/IC2E357697.2023.10262515
Department of ECE
Jaypee University of Information Technology, Solan, Himachal Pradesh, India
*jain.shruti15@gmail.com
Abstract: Plant diseases can affect an extensive range of
commercial crops, and result in a momentous loss in yield.
Most diseases are caught by the farmer walking through the
field and checking the crop. In this research article, the
authors have designed a model for the detection of plant
diseases using the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine
Learning (ML) models. Plant diseases constitute a major
production hazard in agriculture and major crop failures in
the history of man have been due to these diseases. The main
goal is to guarantee farmers' early detection of plant diseases,
which will reduce the need for pesticides. A more stable and
wealthy society is made possible by eliminating the problem
of plant diseases. Farmers click the image of the leaf and
sensors with Arduino send the real-time data to the cloud
where think-speak will visualize the data which was tested
and validated using ML models. Support Vector Machine
(SVM) and k-NN are used as the ML models implemented by
the existing online database. The emergence of accurate
techniques in the field of leaf-based image classification has
shown impressive results. SVM results in 94.65% accuracy.
Keywords: Plant leaf detection, Arduino, Internet of things,
Classification
I. INTRODUCTION
The economy of our nation is heavily reliant on agriculture.
Crop damage may result in unforeseen losses that influence
the farming sectors' output, which will then have a direct
impact on the economy [1]. Therefore, caring for the plants is
essential to upholding the high standards of agriculture and
ensuring effective output and profit. It is not possible to have
trees that are almost resistant to all kinds of diseases, because
if all kinds of trees were observed some diseases like stunting
of leaves, chlorosis of leaves, necrotic spots, shortening of
internodes, etc were found. Farmers may use a wide variety
of crops, insecticides, and pesticides, depending on their
needs. Farmers may only concentrate on cultivating a single
type of crop, and they only need the tools and equipment
required to cope with that crop throughout soil preparation
and harvest [2]. Farmers must employ fertilizers to improve
the soil and the growth of the plants. Farmers also use a lot of
pesticides to protect their plants from illnesses and pests. The
monocultures take a lot of chemical inputs to grow. It
explains why they have a negative influence on the
environment. Many of the chemicals are hazardous and will
have detrimental effects on the soil, even if farmers make
every effort to employ less dangerous compounds or utilize
them in very small concentrations [3]. Mono-cropping
depletes the soil and lowers the availability of nutrients; the
application of pesticides will lead to soil fatigue [4, 5].
Farmers use mono-cropping as an alternative since it requires
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fewer workers and equipment. Therefore, monoculture
farming aids in boosting a farm industry's production and
efficiency. Plants have an autoimmune disease. Additionally,
it ensures harvesting and planting efficiency, which denotes
an increase in production and automates the profit [6, 7].
Plants can be affected by a varied range of diseases, with
bacterial, fungal, nematode, and viral infections. Fungal
diseases are the basis of fungi that infect plants & interfere
with their normal growth and development. It includes
powdery mildew, rust, and root rot. Bacterial diseases are
originated from bacteria that infected plants and produce
toxins that can damage plant tissue. It includes bacterial wilt,
fire blight, and bacterial leaf spot. Viral diseases are caused
by viruses that infect plants and replicate inside their cells. It
includes tomato and tobacco mosaic virus etc. Nematode
diseases are caused by worms called nematodes that infect
plants and feed on their cells, disrupting their normal growth
and development like soybean cyst nematode, and crown
gall. In addition to infectious diseases, plants can also be
affected by physiological disorders, which are caused by
environmental stresses or nutritional imbalances. Examples
of physiological disorders include nutrient deficiencies,
transplant shock, and sunscald.
Leaders in disease forecasting have been the Connecticut
Agricultural Experiment Station in the USA (apple scab),
Rothamsted Research (formerly Rothamsted Experimental
Station) in the UK (potato late blight), the University of
California at Davis (blossom wilt and brown rot of peach)
and Wageningen University and Research Centre, The
Netherlands (wheat yellow rust). Japanese workers have also
done extensive forecasting work with rice blasts. There are
many other centers, and most diseases of any commercial
significance have had work carried out on them.
Hyperactivity of plant inborn immune receptors causes
abnormal defense activation due to which the growth of the
plant is retarded or it may have spontaneous lesions that are
an indicator of plant disease. Because of the absence of
pathogens, the leucine-rich proteins (NLR) are activated
inappropriately and this results in the activation of plant
defense &they show autoimmunity. For the prediction of leaf
diseases, Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be used.
Numerous issues in the realm of agriculture were identified
and resolved with the aid of various AI approaches [8, 9].
Deep learning (DL) Machine Learning (ML), and image
processing (IP) [10, 11] are some of the approaches that have
been used to identify illness in several crops. The field of
agriculture has experienced a transformation brought on by
the newest technology, including AI. It significantly boosts
output and real-time plant disease monitoring.
AI refers to any technique that imitates human behavior. In
 essence, it is a science that seeks to teach computers to solve
challenging and complicated issues[12]. AI
isthetermusedtodescribetheintelligenceexhibitedbyrobotsorot
herdevices.It pertains to the study of computers [13]. It has
greatly enhanced human life, and it is now a prominent and
practical area of study in computer science. A kind of ML
known as DL uses artificial neural networks to adapt to and
learn from massive volumes of data. Additionally, high-level
abstractions are learned from data via hierarchical
architectures. It is a novel method that has previously been
applied in well-known AI applications. Three key causes,
including the development of chip processing, the availability
of expensive computer hardware, and machine learning
techniques, have contributed to the current boom in deep
learning. Numerous deep-learning algorithms have been
thoroughly examined and debated in recent years. Machine
learning is an application of AI that relies on information and
algorithms to assess situations and make judgments devoid of
human input. It talks about how computers carry out
activities on their own depending on their past knowledge
[14]. In the realm of agriculture, image processing is mostly
used to identify plant illnesses and to pinpoint the specific
portion of a plant's leaf that the disease has impacted [15].
Due to the effectiveness and precision of its algorithms,
machine learning is utilized as a tool for disease diagnosis in
agriculture [16].To address several issues with agriculture
and plant diseases, computer application in the field of
agriculture was established. Due to its great performance and
accuracy, AI is the most often employed technique for the
detection of plant diseases [17].
plants for their living. Plant diseases constitute a major
production hazard in agriculture and major crop failures in
the history of man have been due to these diseases. The
agrochemical industry has risen to the challenges by
providing antidotes for the treatment of all kinds of plant
diseases as they break out. There are ample numbers of
chemicals available in the market that was manufactured to
control plant leaf diseases. This is done by inhibiting the
growth or by killing the disease-causing pathogens. An effort
to improve plants by breeding for disease resistance is the
other way to curb plant diseases. This approach exploits the
resistance that is available in nature through genetic transfer
from source to desired plants as reproductive boundaries
permit. Image processing is a technique that examines and
manipulates images using computer algorithms. The
detection of plant diseases is one of the applications of AI in
the world of agriculture. Fungi, bacteria, and viruses are the
most prevalent illnesses that can harm leaves, but insects can
also have an influence that manifests as spots on plant leaves.
In this research article, an application for farmers was
designed that will be used to upload real-time images of
leaves that classify from sick plants and receive information
about the disease. The main methodology used in this paper
is illustrated in Fig 1.

Most often, visual inspection is used to recognize plant

diseases. This is a conventional method for dealing with plant
disease detection; farmers used to seek the advice of
specialists who would spend a lot of time attempting to
pinpoint the specific illness that was damaging the plant
leaves. Farmers have to keep an eye on their crops to
minimize losses. Since plant diseases have negative effects
on both the economy and the environment. The manual
nature of the monitoring process and the need for expertise
make this a conventional technique with several time-related
limitations. In this article, crop monitoring is made to be
digital and partially automatic, which means that the disease
might be diagnosed in an easier, quicker, and less expensive
manner just from the symptoms that are presented on the leaf.
Real-time images will be captured by the farmers which were
sent to the cloud using the Internet of Things (IoT) resulting
in a real-time database. The stored images are validated using
the proposed model designed by the existing dataset.

This paper comprises, section 2 explains the procedure for

the prediction of plant leaves disease using IoT and ML,
section 3 explains the results of various steps used for the
detection of plant leaves & section 4 shows the concluding
remarks.
II. METHODOLOGY
Plants are affected by so many diseases. Indeed, major
disease outbreaks (epiphytotic) have caused famine in the
history of man: blights of potatoes, mildews, rusts, etc. There
is also a class of production hazards mediated by pests:
insects, rodents, snails, and other animals which depend on
Figure 1: Steps of Prediction of Plant leaf disease
Frogeye Leaf Spot, Bacterial Blight (bacteria), Anthracnose,
Cercospora Leaf Spot, Alternaria Leaf Spot, White Spot, and
Powdery Mildew are the most prevalent plant diseases [5].
Alternaria Alternate is a fungus that causes marks on the
plant's leaves and is one of the frequent plant diseases. It is
harmful to both plant and human health since it may lead to
asthma in humans as shown in Fig 2 (a). Bacterial Blight is
one of the hazardous illnesses that may harm a leaf and one

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 of the earliest signs is the black & yellow patches may also
cause necrotic blotches as shown in Fig 2 (b). High
temperatures and humidity promote the emergence and
spread of Cercospora Leaf Spot of sickness. On the plant's
leaf, there are tiny grey specks that identify it as shown in Fig
2 (c).
(a) (b)
(c)
Fig 2: Different plat leaf diseases (a) Alternaria Alternate, (b)
Bacterial Blight, (c) Cercospora Leaf
The detection accuracy not only depends on the ML
algorithm but also depends on the type of images used. For
plant leaf detection, a multispectral image provides better
information for plant disease detection. These multispectral
images will allow the algorithm to be less computationally
expensive and with better accuracy than by using RGB
images. The unwanted distortion, like spores and dust, is
eliminated to enhance the image quality which is done in a
pre-processing step. In this step hue of the photo, and scan is
changed. Mainly images are transformed from RGB to
L*a*b*colour space (where L*stands for the luminance layer
and a*and b* for chromaticity layers). After this stage
segmentation is done. Segmentation serves to distinguish the
non-disease zone from the area that the illness allows on the
leaf picture. There are different techniques for segmentation,
where the Region of Interest (RoI) is marked. The RoI has a
lower overall size than the original picture. In this paper, K-
mean clustering is used as a segmentation algorithm. With
each observation belonging to the cluster with the closest
mean, this method's main goal is to split n observations into
k clusters. Each pixel in the uploaded image is labeled based
on the k-means results, and the clustering results are saved in
a blank cell array. The selection of a practical cluster is a
crucial component of this process. The cluster was chosen
because it represents the largest area that the sickness has
impacted. During the subsequent step of feature extraction,
the characteristics of the selected clusters are retrieved.
There are other techniques for extracting features, but in this
article, the Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix
(GLCM)features are employed [18]. The GLCM is renowned
for its capacity to extract textural characteristics that will
simplify any further analysis. Using the image, this approach
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determines each pixel’s particular intensity. Since the chosen
image was created in RGB format, it will be converted to
grayscale. The classification of the illness was done using the
machine learning approaches namely k nearest neighbor
(kNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) approaches [19].
The model is trained which was validated by real-time
images using IoT. IoT touches every facet of our lives. IoT
helps to interconnect physical objects equipped with sensing,
actuating, and computing power and thus lends them the
capability to collaborate on a task in unison remaining
connected to the internet. The lifeline of IoT lies in the ability
of IoT devices to transmit and receive information. Wireless
communication is the ideal form of communication for IoT.
However, IoT devices do not send and receive data in the same
way hence different connectivity options have been developed
to cater to the different applications. These connectivity options
have different coverage, and power requirements and offer
different bit rates. It is prudent to consider these variations
when deciding which option to utilize for a given IoT device.
IoT can contain a myriad of devices according to its
architecture and application. When talking about the protocol
used only for IoT is MQTT. Other protocols used in an IoT
ecosystem are XMPP and HTTP. They also use other protocols
for managing the network such as SNMP, NETCONF, and
CLI. The farmers checked the real-time images which were
processed and implemented by Arduino and different sensors.
Arduino Uno is a microcontroller development board based on
the Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller and made by the
company Arduino. Arduino is like the spinal cord. It connects
to a large number of peripherals and provides spontaneous
communication. It is good for low-intelligence tasks. Arduino
is more rugged and has a much wider operating voltage range.
More importantly, it has got a pretty neat IDE to easily
program making it suitable for controlling your sensors &
actuators. The images were stored in the cloud using Arduino
and were visualized by Thing Speak.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Our economy is highly dependent on Agriculture and address
several issues with agriculture and plant diseases, computer
application in the field of agriculture was established. Plants
have an autoimmune disease. Hyperactivity of plant innate
immune receptors causes abnormal defense activation due to
which the growth of the plant is retarded or it may have
spontaneous lesions that are an indicator of plant disease.
Due to its great performance and accuracy, AI is the most
often employed technique for the detection of plant diseases
[7]. If proper care is not taken then it can cause serious
effects on plants which affect productivity and quantity. In
this article detection of unhealthy regions or analysis the leaf
infection like bacterial blight, and Alternaria alternata is done
using Arduino and ML algorithms. Arduino is the
microcontroller where all the data sets and codes are stored.
The hardware design of our model is shown in Fig 3.
 by being given an integer value. T he two illnesses: Alternaria
alternata and Bacterial Blight for our model are illustrated in
Fig5&Fig 6.

Fig 3: Implementation using IoT

Fig 5: Different labels of Alternaria Alternata
Figure 3 shows the IoT implementation of our proposed
model in Tinker cad. The model comprises Arduino, DC
motor, IR sensors, ultrasound sensor, and ESP 32 pi cam. The
power supply utilized by Arduino is 5V whereas the power
supply required by DC motors is 12V, due to this L298N H-
the bridge is used. IR sensor is used for path detection thus
making the process more consistent. It is coupled with an
ultrasonic sensor for obstacle detection.ESP 32 pi cam is used
for taking images of leaves for disease detection. Fig 4 shows
the designed model using IoT.

Fig 6: Different labels of bacterial blight

The Kaggle dataset is used as the existing dataset. The

images are sharpened and smoothened using a weighted
average filter and a Laplacian filter respectively. The pre-
processed images are segmented using the k-means clustering
technique to determine the RoI. The GLCM features are
extracted from the RoI as tabulated in Table 1.

Table 1: Extracted GLCM Features

Fig 4: Designed model

Fig 4 shows the designed model using IoT via Arduino and
the data is stored in the cloud. Readings from the sensors
were also sent to a Thingspeak channel to visualize the data.
ThingSpeak is an open data platform and API which allows SVM and kNN classifiers are used to classify the features
one to collect, store, analyze, visualize, and act on data from retrieved from the dataset. The classification accuracies are
sensors or actuators like Arduino. Several groups of illnesses tabulated in Table 2.
affect a lot of leaves. Each illness in a class is given a label

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 Table 2: Classification Accuracy
Classifiers Accuracy
SVM 94.65%
kNN 93.45%
94.65% and 93.45% accuracy are obtained using SVM and
kNN classifiers respectively. Real-time images of various
illnesses and their derived characteristics are used to train the
model. Finally, based on this comparison, the system will be
able to determine the kind of sickness, which means that it
contrasts the values of the vector properties in the database.
Therefore, it could predict the disease depending on the
values that are matching. The data we obtained includes
various images of leaf illnesses that were downloaded from
the internet; these images are saved in a database on the
computer and are utilized, together with images of healthy
leaves, to train our s ys t e m . Additionally, creating the
standalone application will increase the technology's usability
and accessibility for farmers. As a consequence, a standalone
application for distinguishing between healthy plants and
plants afflicted by illness has been created. Detection of plant
diseases using technology is beneficial as it reduces the work
of monitoring big farms.
IV. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
The easiest way to maintain a high yield is through the
identification of plant diseases using IP. The major objective
of this paper is to demonstrate how image-processing tools
help farmers to increase yields while also ensuring precise
findings for the diagnosis of plant diseases. We can design a
model using an existing dataset where different IP steps were
employed. 94.65% accuracy is obtained using SVM which
results in a 1.2% accuracy improvement in comparison to
kNN. The model is validated by the real-time images that
farmers took from their farms. The proposed model helps in
detection of the plant leaves disease. In the future, we will try
to develop a mobile application that will greatly simplify the
procedure for farmers and to employ drones to increase the
dataset of training photographs and boost the precision of our
suggested method.
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