Comparative Analysis of CNN and SVM Machine Learning Techniques for Plant Disease Detection

The growing advancement of different jobs, skills and businesses has stimulated the spread of diseases. Most of the time, these diseases can cross countries’ borders and spread at a very rapid rate. Avoiding and detecting these infections have proved to be a major problem for our public health and one that must be treated with great importance. Crop disease has haunted, farmers have been victimized for several decades, and a remedy must be offered to halt this damage. As a result, a system should be developed to detect plant disease. Untreated plant diseases ultimately result in a loss to the farmer. Traditional methods of detecting plant disease have become less efficient and inaccurate; thus there is need to improve on the techniques of plant disease detection, as a reliable detection of plant diseases will greatly improve the quality of food crops produced and decrease the threat plant diseases pose to food security. Therefore, this study is aimed at analyzing comparatively, two machine learning language techniques convolutional neural network (CNN) and support vector machine (SVM) in terms of their respective accuracy in detecting plant diseases through their leaves in which both algorithms are used for the automatic diagnosis of plant disease. From the experimental test conducted on various plants using CNN and SVM algorithms, CNN had an accuracy of 98%, while SVM had an accuracy of 62% on various plant leaves used.