Detection of Disease in Maize Plant Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Agriculture is vital to the Indian economy as over 17 percent of total GDP and employs more than 60 percent of the population relies on agriculture. This research focuses on plant diseases as they create a major threat to food production as well as for small-scale farmer’s livelihood. Expert workers are employed in traditional farming to visually evaluate row by row to identify plant diseases, which is a time-consuming, labor-intensive activity that is potentially error-prone because it is done by humans. The aim of this research is to develop an automated detection model that uses a combination of image processing and deep learning techniques (Faster R-CNN+ResNet50) to analyze real-time images and detect and classify the three common maize plant diseases: Common Rust, Cercospora Leaf Spot, and Northern Leaf Blight. The proposed system achieved 91% accuracy and successfully detects three maize diseases.