Identification of Late Blight in Potato Leaves Using Image Processing and Machine Learning

Potato is a widely consumed food worldwide, and its productivity has increased due to new varieties and the use of technologies related to irrigation, nutrition, and soil preparation, among others. However, diseases such as late blight disease can often affect the crop, impacting many farmers around the world. As a way to help production, technology in agriculture is increasing. Among the various computational techniques that can be applied, those based on digital image processing associated with machine learning algorithms stand out, producing excellent results. This work aimed to develop a methodology for recognizing late blight disease in potato leaves using digital image processing techniques and machine learning algorithms. It was possible to obtain promising results. The experiments were carried out in a set of images from a public database containing images of healthy and unhealthy leaves (with late blight). We compare the performance of machine learning algorithms using feature vectors obtained with SIFT algorithm and RGB descriptors. The best performance was using the Decision Tree algorithm and SIFT vectors, with 99.24% of accuracy.