An Evaluation of Various Machine Learning Approaches for Detecting Leaf Diseases in Agriculture

Background: Machine learning has shown remarkable promise in recent years for use in areas such as pattern detection and categorization. The diagnosis of diseases is crucial in agriculture since they are a natural occurrence in plants. The easiest and most effective way to identify crop disease is through the use of image processing, computer vision and machine learning techniques. Methods: To identify and categorize cotton leaf diseases, the study compares the effectiveness of established techniques like Support Vector Machine (SVM) and random forest with state-of-the-art techniques like neural network (CNN) methods and architectures like Inceptionv3, VGG16 and RasNet50 with data augmentation and transfer learning. Result: The models were trained with four distinct types of plant photos that were manually gathered from a government agency and a farm. It was also noted that as the quantity of training data rose, so performed the resultant models.