• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.3312-3327
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• 2020

Plant diseases are a significant yield and quality constraint for farmers around the world due to their severe impact on agricultural productivity. Such losses can have a substantial impact on the economy which causes a reduction in farmer's income and higher prices for consumers. Further, it may also result in a severe shortage of food ensuing violent hunger and starvation, especially, in less-developed countries where access to disease prevention methods is limited. This research presents an investigation of Directional Local Quinary Patterns (DLQP) as a feature descriptor for plants leaf disease detection and Support Vector Machine (SVM) as a classifier. The DLQP as a feature descriptor is specifically the first time being used for disease detection in horticulture. DLQP provides directional edge information attending the reference pixel with its neighboring pixel value by involving computation of their grey-level difference based on quinary value (-2, -1, 0, 1, 2) in 0°, 45°, 90°, and 135° directions of selected window of plant leaf image. To assess the robustness of DLQP as a texture descriptor we used a research-oriented Plant Village dataset of Tomato plant (3,900 leaf images) comprising of 6 diseased classes, Potato plant (1,526 leaf images) and Apple plant (2,600 leaf images) comprising of 3 diseased classes. The accuracies of 95.6%, 96.2% and 97.8% for the above-mentioned crops, respectively, were achieved which are higher in comparison with classification on the same dataset using other standard feature descriptors like Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and Local Ternary Patterns (LTP). Further, the effectiveness of the proposed method is proven by comparing it with existing algorithms for plant disease phenotyping.