Automatic detection of diseased tomato plants using thermal and stereo visible light images

PLoS One. 2015 Apr 10;10(4):e0123262. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0123262. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Accurate and timely detection of plant diseases can help mitigate the worldwide losses experienced by the horticulture and agriculture industries each year. Thermal imaging provides a fast and non-destructive way of scanning plants for diseased regions and has been used by various researchers to study the effect of disease on the thermal profile of a plant. However, thermal image of a plant affected by disease has been known to be affected by environmental conditions which include leaf angles and depth of the canopy areas accessible to the thermal imaging camera. In this paper, we combine thermal and visible light image data with depth information and develop a machine learning system to remotely detect plants infected with the tomato powdery mildew fungus Oidium neolycopersici. We extract a novel feature set from the image data using local and global statistics and show that by combining these with the depth information, we can considerably improve the accuracy of detection of the diseased plants. In addition, we show that our novel feature set is capable of identifying plants which were not originally inoculated with the fungus at the start of the experiment but which subsequently developed disease through natural transmission.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Ascomycota / pathogenicity*
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Light
  • Plant Diseases / microbiology*
  • Plant Leaves / microbiology
  • Solanum lycopersicum / microbiology*
  • Temperature

Grants and funding

The authors would like to thank Horticultural Development Company (HDC) and the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick to fund the project (CP60a). The authors would also like to thank the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for providing the thermal imaging camera Cedip Titanium via their loan pool scheme. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.