Towards automating visual in-field monitoring of crop health

We present an application that demonstrates a proof of concept system for automated in-the-field monitoring of disease in wheat crops. Such in-situ applications are required to be robust in the presence of clutter, provide rapid and accurate analysis and are able to operate at scale. We propose a processing pipeline that detects key wheat diseases in cluttered field imagery. First, we describe and evaluate a high dimensional texture descriptor combined with a randomised forest approach for automated primary leaf recognition. Second, we show that a combined nearest neighbour classifier and voting system applied to segmented leaf regions can robustly determine the presence and type of disease. The system has been tested on a real-world database of images of wheat leaves captured in-the-field using a standard smart phone.