An Optimized Method for Segmentation and Classification of Apple Diseases Based on Strong Correlation and Genetic Algorithm Based Feature Selection

Agriculture is a major part of the world economy as it provides food safety. However, in recent years, it has been noted that plants are extensively infected by different diseases. This causes enormous economic losses in agriculture industry around the world. The manual inspection of fruit diseases is a difficult process which can be minimized by using automated methods for detection of plant diseases at the earlier stage. In this paper, a new method is implemented for apple diseases identification and recognition. Three pipeline procedures are followed by preprocessing, spot segmentation, and features extraction, and classification. In the first step, the apple leaf spots are enhanced by a hybrid method which is the conjunction of 3D box filtering, de-correlation, 3D-Gaussian filter, and 3D-median filter. After that, the lesion spots are segmented by the strong correlation-based method and optimized their results by fusion of expectation maximization (EM) segmentation. Finally, the color, color histogram, and local binary pattern (LBP) features are fused by comparison-based parallel fusion. The extracted features are optimized by genetic algorithm and classified by One-vs-All M-SVM. The experimental results are performed on plant village dataset. The proposed methodology is tested for four types of apple disease classes including healthy leaves, Blackrot, Rust, and Scab. The classification accuracy shows the improvement of our method on selected apple diseases. Moreover, the good preprocessing step always produced prominent features which later achieved significant classification accuracy.