Energy efficient mobile vision system for plant leaf disease identification

Close monitoring, proper control and management of plant diseases are essential in the efficient cultivation of crops. This paper presents a scheme that uses mobile phones for real-time on-field imaging of diseased plants followed by disease diagnosis via analysis of visual phenotypes. A threshold based offloading scheme is employed for judicious sharing of the computational load between the mobile device and a central server at the plant pathology laboratory, thereby offering a trade-off between the power consumption in the mobile device and the transmission cost. The part of the processing carried out in the mobile device includes leaf image segmentation and spotting of disease patch using improved k-means clustering. The algorithm is simple and hence suitable for Android based mobile devices. The segmented image is subsequently communicated to the central server. This ensures reduced transmission cost compared to that in transmitting full leaf image.