Cucumber Disease Detection Using Artificial

Neural Network

Ms. Pooja Pawar Dr. Varsha Turkar. Prof. Pravin Patil.

Dept. of Electronics and
Telecommunication Engineering
Vidyalankar Institute of Technology
Mumbai, India.
poojapawar479@gmail.com
Dept. of Electronics Engineering
Vidyalankar Institute of Technology
Mumbai, India.
varshaturkar@gmail.com
Dept. of Electronics and
Telecommunication Engineering
Vidyalankar Institute of Technology
Mumbai, India.
pravin.patil@vit.edu.in

Abstract—India is an agricultural country; wherein most of
the population depends on agricultural products. Disease on any
plants leads to the considerable reduction in both the quality
and quantity of agricultural products. Thus detection and
diagnosis of disease at the right time is essential to the farmer.
Accurate detection and identification of crop diseases plays an
important role in effectively controlling and preventing diseases
for sustainable agriculture and food security. For detecting crop
disease early and accurately, a system is developed using image
processing techniques and artificial neural network. The system
mainly includes various concepts related to image processing
such as image acquisition, image pre-processing, feature
extraction, creating database and classification by using
artificial neural network. In the proposed work, database is a
collection of various texture features of cucumber leaves.
Keywords— Crop disease, statistical moments, GLCM,
Artificial neural network, diagnosis
I. INTRODUCTION
Cucumber (Cucumis sativus) is a widely cultivated plant
in the gourd family, Cucurbitaceae. Cucumber diseases have
characteristics of high disease incidence, frequent and fast
infection and so on. Hence cucumber diseases like downy
mildew and powdery mildew primarily affect the foliage of
these crops and can result in losses in commercial fields and
home gardens. If diseases occur, the loss of product will be
very serious [11].
Downy mildew is a common disease that occurs on
cucurbits. It is an aggressive, fast-moving disease that is very
difficult to manage once it started. Symptoms of downy
mildew are first appearing as pale-to-bright yellow spots on
the upper surface of leaves in the crown area of the plant. As
lesions expand and the number of lesions increases, leaves
become necrotic and plants will appear scorched [14]. Also
the powdery mildew can affect all cucurbits. Powdery
mildew first appears as talc like colonies on the upper and
lower surface of leaves that are older or on shaded portions of
the plant. As the disease progresses, the entire leaf surface
will be colonized by the fungus. Severely infected leaves
become yellow and then necrotic, these leaves die within a
short period of time and may result in large-scale defoliation
[14]. Plant disease is one of the major causes of reduction in
quantity and degrades quality of the product [5]. The visual
observation of experts is the main approach adopted in
practice for detection and identification of plant diseases.
This approach is expensive and time consuming in large
farms. Further, in some developing countries, farmers may
need to go long distances to contact experts [5].
In recent years, there are many concepts of image
processing technology that have been applied to identify
plant disease. The system designs were based on extraction of
color, shape, texture features and on SVM classifier [3]. Also
it was observed that the SVM method based on the different
kernel function gives different results. The work was carried
out by conducting two sets of tests using different kernel
functions like RBF kernel function, polynomial kernel
function and sigmoid kernel function. The results showed
that, the support vector machine method based on the RBF
kernel function; which considers each spot as a sample; made
the best performance for classification of diseases of
cucumber [11].Also the system was designed with BP neural
network classifier with RGB-to-LAB transformation method
for color extraction [4]. BP neural network with GLCM
feature extraction method approach was also developed to
identify crop disease [5]. Majority of the conventional work
focuses only on classification. Proposed work will also
provide treatment to the crop disease. Also texture feature
extraction will be carried out not only by using GLCM but
also by first order statistical moments method.
The literature survey suggests that the existing systems do
not provide preventive measures since most of them focus on
classification of crop disease. In order to overcome such
drawbacks, a system is proposed that will provide diagnosis
and treatment to the crop disease. Also features such as
texture will also be extracted using Gray Level Co-
occurrence Matrix (GLCM) along with first order statistical
moment’s method. GLCM is a matrix that describes the
frequency of one gray level appearing in a specified spatial
linear relationship with another gray level within the area of
investigation. The contents of this GLCM matrix can be used
to calculate texture features by observing the measure of
variation in intensity at the pixel of interest.
 II. PROPOSED APPROACH
The proposed system aims at developing real time system
for crop disease diagnosis and giving preventive measures
and treatment for crop disease. The proposed system is
explained with the help of flow chart given below in Fig. 1:
Fig.1. Flowchart for Proposed System
A. Image acquisition
The first step in the proposed approach is image
acquisition. Farmer should capture the image of infected crop
and this image will act as a input to the system. Also the
images are needed to train neural network. Images for
cucumber crop have been used for training the network. The
field work for cucumber images was carried out dated on 10
January 2016 at Ghadne, Wada. Some images are also
obtained from World Wide Web. Images for cucumber crop
disease are shown in Fig.2.
(a) (b)
Fig.2. Cucumber Crop Disease: (a) Downy Mildew (b) Powdery Mildew
B. Image Pre-processing:
As quality of cucumber leaf images is good, proposed
work doesn’t uses any pre-processing method. If noise is
detected in image, smoothing filtering can be applied to
eliminate noise from the image.
C. Feature Extraction:
The aim of this phase is to find and extract features that
can be used to determine crop disease. In image processing,
image features usually include color, shape and texture
features, etc. Out of these features, texture feature is used to
train the network. This is done by using first order and
second order statistical moments. First order statistical
moments includes mean, standard deviation, kurtosis and
skewness whereas second order statistical moments includes
Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) features.
1) First order statistical moments: The first order
statistics estimate properties (e.g. average and variance) of
individual pixel values by waiving the spatial interaction
between image pixels. First order statistical moments are
mean standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis.
Mean and standard deviation are defined below where x is
the value of the pixel in the sub-image, and n is the number
of pixels
a) Mean: The mean takes the average level of
intensity of the image or texture being examined.
(1)
b) Standard deviation: It is a most widely used
measure of variability or diversity used in statistics. In terms
of image processing it shows how much variation or
"dispersion" exists from the average (mean, or expected
value). A low standard deviation indicates that the data points
tend to be very close to the mean, whereas high standard
deviation indicates that the data points are spread out over a
large range of values.
(2)
A fundamental task in many statistical analyses is to
characterize the location and variability of a data set. A
further characterization of the data includes skewness and
kurtosis. Kurtosis and skewness are defined below where μ is
the mean and is the variance of random variable X.
c) Kurtosis:
Kurtosis is a measure of whether the data are heavy-
tailed or light-tailed relative to a normal distribution. It is
a related to a fourth order moment.
(3)
d) Skewness: Skewness is usually described as a
measure of a dataset’s symmetry – or lack of symmetry.The
skewness for a normal distribution is zero, and any
symmetric data should have skewness near zero. It is a
related to a third order moment. Darker and glossier regions
are tends to be a more positively skewed as compare to
lighter and dull surfaces.
(4)
2) Second order statistical moments (GLCM): The
GLCM is a well-established statistical device for extracting
second order texture information from images. A GLCM is a
matrix where the number of rows and columns is equal to the
number of distinct gray levels or pixel values in the image of
that surface [2]. GLCM is a matrix that describes frequency
of one gray level appearing in a specified spatial linear
relationship with another gray level within the area of
investigation. Given an image, each with an intensity, the
GLCM is a tabulation of how often different combinations of
gray levels co-occur in an image or image section. Texture
feature calculations use the contents of the GLCM to give a
measure of the variation in intensity at the pixel of interest.
Typically, the co-occurrence matrix is computed based on
two parameters, which are the relative distance between the
pixel pair d measured in pixel number and their relative
orientation. Normally, is quantized in four directions (e.g., 0º,
45 º, 90 º and 135 º), even though various other combinations
could be possible. GLCM has fourteen features but between
them most useful features are: angular second moment
(ASM), contrast, correlation, inverse difference moment, sum
entropy and information measures of correlation [9].
Texture features can be used as useful discriminator for
target images when color or shape features fails to
discriminate. Five GLCM texture features listed below are
extracted for each image which will be used for training
Neural Network in the next step for classification. Some of
them are defined by the equations given below, where μx, μy
and σx, σy denote the mean and standard deviations of the
row and column sums of the matrix, respectively [related to
the marginal distributions px(i) and py(j)].
a) Contrast: The contrast (Con) is defined in Equation
(5), is a measure of intensity of a pixel and its neighbour over
the image. In the visual perception of the real world, contrast
is determined by the difference in the colour and brightness
of the object and other objects within the same field of view.
Contrast:
(5)
b) Correlation:Correlation measures the linear
dependency of gray levels of neighboring pixels. It is defined
as in Equation (6)as:
Correlation:
(6)
c) Entropy:This concept comes from
thermodynamics. Entropy (Ent) is the measure of randomness
that is used to characterize the texture of the input image. Its
value will be maximum when all the elements of the co-
occurrence matrix are the same. It is also defined as in
Equation (7) as:
Entropy:
(7)
d) Homogeneity: Inverse Difference Moment (IDM)
is a measure of image texture as defined in Equation (8).
IDM is usually called homogeneity that measures the local
homogeneity of an image. IDM feature obtains the measures
of the closeness of the distribution of the GLCM elements to
the GLCM diagonal. IDM has a range of values so as to
determine whether the image is textured or non-textured.
Homogeneity:
(8)
e) Energy: Energy (E) can be defined as the measure
of the extent of pixel pair repetitions. It measures the
uniformity of an image. When pixels are very similar, the
energy value will be large. It is defined in Equation (9) as-
Energy:
(9)
D. Classification:
Image classification analyzes the numerical properties of
various image features and organizes data into relative
categories of crop diseases. There are two main types of
classification: Unsupervised classification and supervised
classification.
Unsupervised classification methods includes: self-
organizing map, adaptive resonance theory, k-means
clustering, etc. whereas supervised classification methods
includes: neural network, support vector machine, decision
tree algorithm, etc. Proposed method uses artificial neural
network for classification. To classify a pattern, certain
characteristic values from that particular pattern are input into
the directed graph at the corresponding source nodes. There
is one sink node for each class. The output value that is
generated indicates the probability that the corresponding
input pattern belongs to that class [13]. The pattern will then
be assigned to the class with the highest probability of
membership. The learning process modifies the labeling of
the arcs to better classify patterns. After the classification is
done for the training set the results are compared with the
actual classification and the accuracy is computed. Learning
process continues with different weights and with all the
training data or until the classification accuracy is adequate
[13].
Steps followed in NN classifier:
1. Determine the number of output nodes as well as what
characteristics should be used as input to discriminate
different patterns/classes in image.
2. The number of hidden layers (between the input and output
nodes) also must be decided.
3. Determine weights and activation functions to be used for
the graph.
4. For each pattern in the training set, propagate it through the
network and evaluate the output predication to the actual
result. If the predication is accurate then adjust weights to
ensure that this predication has a higher output weight the
next time. If the predication is not correct then adjust the
weights to provide a lower output value for this class.
5. Steps are repeated till all the patterns are classified to the
appropriate classes.
E. Diagnosis and Treatment:
Classification diagnoses the cucumber crop disease using
ANN. Once the classifier diagnoses crop disease, the system
will give symptoms of disease. Also it will give remedies and
preventive measures for disease.
III. CLASSIFICATION USING ANN
There are three classes for cucumber crop disease
classification such as powdery mildew, downy mildew and
healthy plant. The texture features will act as inputs to a
neural network and the cucumber crop disease will be target.
Given an input, which constitutes the nine texture features ,
the neural network is expected to identify correct cucumber
disease. This is achieved by presenting previously recorded
inputs to a neural network and then tuning it to produce the
desired target outputs[13]. This process is called neural
network training. Algorithm for classification using ANN:
x Preparing the data
The texture features like contrast, correlation,
homogeneity, energy, entropy, mean, kurtosis,
skewness and standard deviation are extracted by
using GLCM and first order statistical moments
method. And the values of features are stored in .CSV
(comma separated by values) files. The first nine
columns of data gives nine texture features and tenth
column gives the class. The classes for ex. Unhealthy
and Healthy can be represented as [1 0] and [0 1]
respectively. Also if plant is unhealthy then classes,
Powdery mildew and Downy mildew can be
represented as [1 0] and [0 1] respectively.
Creating training sets:
The whole images are taken to extract texture features
and stored to CSV file.
Creating testing sets:
1. The test images are taken same as training images.
2. The precaution is taken while taking the images. The
image should be different than the training image.
3. The subset of the training data can be used as a
testing data.
x Preprocess the data into a form that can be used with a
neural network. The neural network object in the
MATLAB toolbox expects the samples along columns
and its features along rows. Our dataset has its samples
along rows and its features along columns. Hence the
matrices have to be transposed.
x Building the neural network classifier
The next step is to create a neural network (feed
forward back propagation network) that will learn to
identify the classes. Since the neural network starts
with random initial weights, the results will differ
slightly every time it is run. The random seed or
twister is set to avoid this randomness.
x A 1-hidden layer feed forward network is created with
28 neurons in the hidden layer.
x Now the network is ready to be trained. Here testing
set is created while creating the training set. The
training set is used to teach the network. Training
continues as long as the network continues improving
on the validation set. The test set provides a
completely independent measure of network accuracy.
x Testing the classifier.
The trained neural network can now be tested with the
testing samples. This will give us a sense of how well
the network will do when applied to data from the real
world.
x Computation of classification accuracy using
confusion matrix.
The network response can now be compared against
the desired target response to build the classification
matrix which will provide a comprehensive picture of
a classifiers performance.
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
Work involves collecting of leaf samples of cucumber
crop diseases. After acquisition of images, dataset is prepared
to train the neural network. MATLAB 7.10.1 is used for
neural network toolbox. Data is given in CSV file with
columns representing texture features and rows representing
image samples. Also it includes three classes: downy mildew,
powdery mildew and healthy plant. First CSV file is used to
classify two classes healthy and unhealthy plant. If plant is
unhealthy then second CSV file is used to classify cucumber
crop disease else it will display message plant is healthy.
Classification accuracy achieved is 80.45%.
The GUI consisting of diagnosis and treatment for the
crop diseases is developed for the system. The GUI for
cucumber crop disease detection is shown below in Fig.3
along with crop disease treatment message box as shown in
Fig.4.

Fig.3. GUI developed for crop disease detection. Downy mildew is detected
by the system
Fig.4. Crop Disease Treatment Message Box
V. CONCLUSION
Study involves collecting leaf samples of cucumber crop
diseases. Work is carried out to diagnose cucumber crop
disease and to provide treatment for the detected crop
disease. Two cucumber crop diseases downy mildew and
powdery mildew are considered in this work. The GLCM and
first order statistical moments are used to extract texture
features. Classification is carried out by using neural network
toolbox of MATLAB 7.10.1. System provides classification
accuracy of 80.45%. The proposed work can be applicable
for more than one crop of different types. But for other crop
type, system has to select those features only that can classify
their crop diseases accurately. In future, classification
accuracy can be increased by using additional texture
features. Gabor filter can also be used for texture feature
extraction.
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