Health Detection of Wheat Crop Using Pattern Recognition and Image Processing

1. Introduction

India is agriculture-oriented country. 69% of Indian population has agriculture as their main occupation or side business. The production or cultivation of useful crops in the Ecosystem produced by the people is known as agriculture (Mahendra Dev, 2014). From another point of view, the farmers are the ecosystem engineers who find new ways for cultivation of crops. Wheat is one of the most popular cultivation crops. Wheats along with rice makes around two thirds of the food consumed by people in the world. There are many problems that farmers who grow wheat face today like rainfall, improper yield, over fertilization, flood damage. One of the important problems in these is the effect of disease in the crop. Diseases in wheat account for about 10-30% of loss in production of wheat. (Majumdar, Naraseeyappa, & Ankalaki, 2017). Diseases are also one of the biggest reasons for the expensive prices of wheat today. 1 kilogram in India in 2018 costs about Rs. 23. Poor people who cannot afford end up starving or buying adulterated food. This results in the increase of malnourishment. The farmers are sole affected people due to diseases. Farmers have nothing to do with the diseased plants other than to throw them. Reports have stated that even though 72% of people like farming, 69% of farmers think that job in city is better than agriculture and 62% of farmers are ready to shift from village to city. Looking at some of the reasons behind their thought process, 36% of farmers have claimed that farming does not give them appropriate income for sustaining. Not being able to produce the good yield due to fact that many wheat crops have been affected by the diseases. One of the interesting things to note is that many farmers are unable to detect the diseases in the crop until the severe/irrecoverable state of the disease. There are pesticides and fungicides for many diseases which can be cured when the disease in the initial state. More interesting thing to notice is that, even after huge advancement of technology in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, such fundamental problems are still not fixed. Hence the goal is the merge the advanced technologies present in Machine learning to help the field of Agriculture to benefit the farmers. Wheat production in India is the backbone of granary in our country and it serves as the major crop alongside the rice.

The outline of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the related work on Agriculture and Internet of Things and Machine Learning. In Section 3, the problem is proposed and an approach is provided for the detection of diseases in wheat crop. Section 4 provides the various outcomes of work which helps to judge the type of disease on time. Social Benefits of work are drawn in Section 5 and its commercial benefits are given in section 6. The significance of work has been discussed in section 7. Conclusion and future scope of the proposed approach is given in section 8.