IIT Mandi scientists show the great way to detect disease

The research led by Dr. Srikant Srinivasan, Associate Professor, Social of Computing and Electrical Engineering at IIT Mandi in collaboration with the Central Potato Research Institute (Shimla) uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to highlight the diseased portions of the leaf.

Research work taken up by IIT Mandi scientists was funded by Department of Biotechnology of Government of India, the results of this research scholars, Mr. Joe Johnson and Ms Geetanjali Sharma from IIT Mandi and Dr. Vijay Kumar Dua, Dr. Sanjeev Sharma and Dr. Jagdev Sharma from Central Potato Research Institute of Shimla.

The Blight is a common disease of the potato plant, that starts as uneven light green lesions near the tip and the margins of the leaf and then spreads into large brown to purplish-black necrotic patches that eventually leads to rotting of the plant, say IIT Mandi scientists

If left undetected and unchecked, blight could destroy the entire crop within a week under conducive conditions, say IIT Mandi scientists.

Speaking about the work by IIT Mandi scientists Dr. Srinivasan said in India, as with most developing countries, the detection and identification of blight are performed manually by trained personnel who scout the field and visually inspect potato foliage.

This process, as expected, is tedious and often impractical, especially for remote areas, because it requires the expertise of a horticultural specialist who may not be physically accessible, said Dr. Srinivasan, who led IIT Mandi scientists.

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Joe Johnson, research scholar at IIT Mandi said automated disease detection can help in this regard and given the extensive proliferation of the mobile phones across the country, the smartphone could be a useful tool in this regard.

The advanced HD cameras, better computing power and communication avenues offered by smartphones offer a promising platform for automated disease detection in crops, which can save time and help in the timely management of diseases, in cases of outbreaks, say IIT Mandi scientists.

The computational tool developed by the IIT Mandi scientists can detect blight in potato leaf images.

In order to develop a robust model, healthy and diseased leaf data were collected from fields across Punjab, U.P and Himachal Pradesh by IIT Mandi researchers.

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It was important that the model developed by IIT Mandi scientists should have portability across the nation.

Analysis of the detection performance indicates an overall precision of 98% on leaf images in field environments, said Dr Srinivasan, who led the team of IIT Mandi scientists.

Thus, early detection of blight is important to prevent financial catastrophe to the farmer and the country’s economy.

Following this success, IIT Mandi scientists team is sizing down the model to a few tens of megabytes so that it can be hosted on a smartphone as an application.

With this, when the farmer will photograph the leaf which appears unhealthy, the application will confirm in real-time if the leaf is infected or not, say IIT Mandi scientists.

With this timely knowledge, the farmer would know exactly when to spray the field, saving his produce and minimizing costs associated with unnecessary use of fungicides.

‘The model is being refined as more states are covered,’ said Dr. Srinivasan and highlighted that it would be deployed as part of the FarmerZone app that will be available to potato farmers for free.

The model is built using an AI tool called mask region-based convolutional neural network architecture and can accurately highlight the diseased portions of the leaf amid a complex background of plant and soil matter.