A Novel Approach for Generic Plant Disease Classification

With advances in the globalization of the world market, several new varieties of crop cultivation have popped up. The advances have led to habitat changes, and new varieties of diseases and plants have surfaced to challenge the farmer community. Several advancements have been made to assist today's agriculture. One among them is the utilization of learning-based models to identify plant diseases. However, the literature review shows that studies were carried out to identify specific diseases in particular plants. The exacting models failed to achieve cross-identification of the diseases irrespective of the type of plant. Thus, the proposed study focusses on novel classifier intending towards generic plant disease classification across various crops. The study was trained and tested for mildew, spot, and rot diseases. Through the training and testing for seven plants and blind validation across six other plants, an accuracy of 96.43% in testing and 63% accuracy in validation was obtained.