A Model for Detecting Fungal Diseases in Cotton Cultivation using Segmentation and Machine Learning Approaches

Abstract

This research detailed a model for detecting fungal diseases via techniques for processing images of cotton leaves. The work allowed to develop a model based on the set of preprocessed data, to formulate the developed model, to simulate and evaluate the model. It is about detecting fungal diseases in cotton cultivation. The image data records were collected in an online data repository consisting of images of cotton leaves infected with fungal diseases and normal leaf images. In addition, other images of infected and uninfected cotton leaves were collected in cotton production fields in the Ségbana region in Benin Republic. The model was formulated based on watershed segmentation technique by applying Edge Detection algorithm and K-Means Clustering; and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification. The simulation was done using MATLAB with Image Processing Toolbox 9.4. The results gave an accuracy of 99.05%, specificity 90%, misclassification rate 0.95%, recall rate 99.5% and precision 99.5%. In addition, with less computational effort and in less than a minute, the best results were obtained, showing the efficiency of the image processing technique for the detection and classification of infected and uninfected leaves. It was concluded that this approach was applied to detect fungal diseases on cotton leaves to promote the production and harvest of good quality cotton and valuable cotton products.