Machine Learning to Aid in the Process of Disease Detection and Management in Soilless Farming

Abstract

This research aims at enhancing the methods and techniques that are being used in disease detection when it comes to soilless farming. Soilless farming is quite famous among the Sri Lankan farmers farming in urban areas. A mobile application is launched by us and this application is capable of identifying diseases in plants, therefore, farmers do not have to rely on their years of experience to identify the diseases. A novice farmer may struggle to say what is wrong with their plants, while another farmer with many years of experience may say what the disease is with no hesitation. Both those types of farmers benefit from our mobile application equally. The said mobile application consists of four components and each of them focuses on a different service. One of those components is to detect and manage diseases in plant leaves and that component is what this research paper showcases. This particular component allows the user to capture live-images of plant leaves. Then the application processes the captured image to identify if the plant is suffering from a disease. After that, it generates a report with a set of treatments. It further analyses and alerts the user if this disease detected is going to affect the harvest.