Chapter 9 - Plant diseases detection using artificial intelligence

Abstract

The agricultural sector plays a very important role in the development of a country. The agricultural sector is not only responsible for feeding the growing population, but it is also a vital source of energy and is a solution to global warming. But crop diseases can harm entire crops, which may lead to economic losses and starvation. Plant diseases are detected by using manual observation of the disease symptoms present on parts of plants, especially leaves. This method has significant complexity and, without proper knowledge of the diseases which affect crops, farmers use an excessive number of pesticides, insecticides, etc. for the treatment of plant diseases. Therefore it is the need of the hour to use ever-growing technology for diagnosing diseases so that the right amount and correct chemicals can be used. This review discusses different machine learning and image processing-based techniques that were proposed in different literature for treating plant diseases, as most of these diseases occur only on plant leaves, so surveyed literature consists of those methods and techniques which can diagnose diseases in plants through leaf images.