Disease Detection of Solanaceous Crops Using Deep Learning for Robot Vision

Traditionally, the farmers manage the crops from the early growth stage until the mature harvest stage by manually identifying and monitoring plant diseases, nutrient deficiencies, controlled irrigation, and controlled fertilizers and pesticides. Even the farmers have difficulty detecting crop diseases using their naked eyes due to several similar crop diseases. Identifying the correct diseases is crucial since it can improve the quality and quantity of crop production. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, all crop-managing tasks can be automated using a robot that mimics a farmer's ability. However, designing a robot with human capability, especially in detecting the crop's diseases in real-time, is another challenge to consider. Other research works are focusing on improving the mean average precision and the best result reported so far is 93% of mean Average Precision (mAP) by YOLOv5. This paper focuses on object detection of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture-based to detect the disease of solanaceous crops for robot vision. This study's contribution involved reporting the developmental specifics and a suggested solution for issues that appear along with the conducted study. In addition, the output of this study is expected to become the algorithm of the robot's vision. This study uses images of four crops (tomato, potato, eggplant, and pepper), including 23 classes of healthy and diseased crops infected on the leaf and fruits. The dataset utilized combines the public dataset (PlantVillage) and self-collected samples. The total dataset of all 23 classes is 16580 images divided into three parts: training set, validation set, and testing set. The dataset used for training is 88% of the total dataset (15000 images), 8% of the dataset performed a validation process (1400 images), and the rest of the 4% dataset is for the test process (699 images). The performances of YOLOv5 were more robust in terms of 94.2% mAP, and the speed was slightly faster than Scaled-YOLOv4. This object detection-based approach has proven to be a promising solution in efficiently detecting crop disease in real-time.