Application of neural networks to image recognition of plant diseases

Digital image recognition of plant diseases could reduce the dependence of agricultural production on the professional and technical personnel in plant protection field and is conducive to the development of plant protection informatization. In order to find out a method to realize image recognition of plant diseases, four kinds of neural networks including backpropagation (BP) networks, radial basis function (RBF) neural networks, generalized regression networks (GRNNs) and probabilistic neural networks (PNNs) were used to distinguish wheat stripe rust from wheat leaf rust and to distinguish grape downy mildew from grape powdery mildew based on color features, shape features and texture features extracted from the disease images. The results showed that identification and diagnosis of the plant diseases could be effectively achieved using BP networks, RBF neural networks, GRNNs and PNNs based on image processing. For the two kinds of wheat diseases, the best prediction accuracy was 100% with the fitting accuracy equal to 100% while BP networks, GRNNs or PNNs were used, and the best prediction accuracy was 97.50% with the fitting accuracy equal to 100% while RBF neural networks were used. For the two kinds of grape diseases, the best prediction accuracy was 100% with the fitting accuracy equal to 100% while BP networks, GRNNs or PNNs were used, and the best prediction accuracy was 94.29% with the fitting accuracy equal to 100% while RBF neural networks were used.