Automated Wheat Diseases Classification Framework Using Advanced Machine Learning Technique

Abstract

Around the world, agriculture is one of the important sectors of human life in terms of food, business, and employment opportunities. In the farming field, wheat is the most farmed crop but every year, its ultimate production is badly influenced by various diseases. On the other hand, early and precise recognition of wheat plant diseases can decrease damage, resulting in a greater yield. Researchers have used conventional and Machine Learning (ML)-based techniques for crop disease recognition and classification. However, these techniques are inaccurate and time-consuming due to the unavailability of quality data, inefficient preprocessing techniques, and the existing selection criteria of an efficient model. Therefore, a smart and intelligent system is needed which can accurately identify crop diseases. In this paper, we proposed an efficient ML-based framework for various kinds of wheat disease recognition and classification to automatically identify the brown- and yellow-rusted diseases in wheat crops. Our method consists of multiple steps. Firstly, the dataset is collected from different fields in Pakistan with consideration of the illumination and orientation parameters of the capturing device. Secondly, to accurately preprocess the data, specific segmentation and resizing methods are used to make differences between healthy and affected areas. In the end, ML models are trained on the preprocessed data. Furthermore, for comparative analysis of models, various performance metrics including overall accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score are calculated. As a result, it has been observed that the proposed framework has achieved 99.8% highest accuracy over the existing ML techniques.