AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND CLOUD BASED COLLABORATIVE PLATFORM FOR PLANT DISEASE IDENTIFICATION, TRACKING AND FORECASTING FOR FARMERS

Abstract

Plant leaf diseases and destructive insects are a major challenge in the agriculture sector. Faster and an accurate prediction of leaf diseases in crops could help to develop an early treatment technique while considerably reducing economic losses. Modern advanced developments in Deep Learning have allowed researchers to extremely improve the performance and accuracy of object detection and recognition systems. In this paper, we proposed a deep-learning-based approach to detect leaf diseases in many different plants using images of plant leaves. Our goal is to find and develop the more suitable deep- learning methodologies for our task. Therefore, we consider three main families of detectors: Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN), Region-based Fully Convolutional Network (R-FCN), and Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD), which was used for the purpose of this work. The proposed system can effectively identified different types of diseases with the ability to deal with complex scenarios from a plants area.