Domain‐independent adaptive histogram‐based features for pomegranate fruit and leaf diseases classification

Abstract Disease identification for fruits and leaves in the field of agriculture is important for estimating production, crop yield, and earnings for farmers. In the specific case of pomegranates, this is challenging because of the wide range of possible diseases and their effects on the plant and the crop. This study presents an adaptive histogram‐based method for solving this problem. Our method describe is domain independent in the sense that it can be easily and efficiently adapted to other similar smart agriculture tasks. The approach explores colour spaces, namely, Red, Green, and Blue along with Grey. The histograms of colour spaces and grey space are analysed based on the notion that as the disease changes, the colour also changes. The proximity between the histograms of grey images with individual colour spaces is estimated to find the closeness of images. Since the grey image is the average of colour spaces (R, G, and B), it can be considered a reference image. For estimating the distance between grey and colour spaces, the proposed approach uses a Chi‐Square distance measure. Further, the method uses an Artificial Neural Network for classification. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by testing on a dataset of fruit and leaf images affected by different diseases. The results show that the method outperforms existing techniques in terms of average classification rate.