Cucumber Leaf Disease Detection using GLCM Features with Random Forest Algorithm

Agriculture plays a vital role in India's economy, and the health of crops is critical for maximizing yield. In particular, cucumber, a key salad ingredient known for its health benefits, is susceptible to various diseases such as water mold, bacterial wilt, angular leaf spot, anthracnose, and powdery mildew. These diseases not only affect the quality of cucumbers but also significantly reduce their yield. Early detection of these diseases is crucial for successful cultivation, but traditional manual methods of disease identification by farmers or diagnosticians are time-consuming and prone to misidentification. To address these challenges, we explore advanced artificial intelligence techniques. We implement and compare various machine learning algorithms, including ResNet, AlexNet, and VGG-16, for disease classification in cucumbers. However, these methods often struggle with issues such as noise, irrelevant features, and the generation of pertinent characteristics. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel approach using a GLCM (Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix) feature extraction method combined with a Random Forest classifier. This new algorithm aims to improve the accuracy and efficiency of disease detection. Our dataset comprises four distinct categories: Healthy, Anthracnose, Aphids, and CYSDV. It is sourced from diverse platforms, including online repositories like kaggle and direct collection from cucumber farms. The initial phase of our methodology involves noise reduction by converting images into the LAB color space and isolating specific regions using the k-means clustering algorithm. Subsequently, we extract texture features from the diseased leaf images using the GLCM algorithm, and classification is performed using the Random Forest model. Comparative analysis shows that our proposed Random Forest algorithm outperforms previous models like LGBM (Light Gradient Boosting Machine) and QSVM (Quantum-Support Vector Machine) in predicting disease presence in cucumber plants with higher accuracy rate of 98.62%, Precision 98.77%, Recall 98.48% and also F1 Score 98.62%.