Leaf image based cucumber disease recognition using sparse representation classification

Most existing image-based crop disease recognition algorithms rely on extracting various kinds of features from leaf images of diseased plants. They have a common limitation as the features selected for discriminating leaf images are usually treated as equally important in the classification process. We propose a novel cucumber disease recognition approach which consists of three pipelined procedures: segmenting diseased leaf images by K-means clustering, extracting shape and color features from lesion information, and classifying diseased leaf images using sparse representation (SR). A major advantage of this approach is that the classification in the SR space is able to effectively reduce the computation cost and improve the recognition performance. We perform a comparison with four other feature extraction based methods using a leaf image dataset on cucumber diseases. The proposed approach is shown to be effective in recognizing seven major cucumber diseases with an overall recognition rate of 85.7%, higher than those of the other methods.