Machine Learning and Fuzzy C-Means Clustering for the Identification of Tomato Diseases

Abstract

Diseases in tomato plants can cause economic losses in the agricultural industry. Identification of tomato plant diseases is important to choosing the right action to control their spread. In this research, we propose an approach to identify tomato plant diseases using a machine learning algorithm and lab colour space-based image segmentation using the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm. The segmentation method aims to separate the infected area, leaf image, and background in the tomato plant image. In the first step, the tomato image is represented in the Lab colour space, which allows for combining information on brightness (L), red-green colour components (a), and yellow-blue colour components (b). Then, the FCM algorithm is applied to segment the image. The segmentation results are then evaluated through an identification process using machine learning techniques such as k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN), Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Naïve Bayes (NB) to measure the level of accuracy. The dataset used in this research is tomato images, which include various plant diseases obtained from the Kaggle dataset. The performance results of the proposed method show that the segmentation approach based on Lab colour space with the FCM clustering algorithm is able to identify infected areas well. The accuracy value of each machine learning method used is kNN of 85.40%, RF of 88.87%, SVM of 80.73%, and NB of 74.60%. The proposed method shows success in accurately identifying types of tomato plant diseases and obtains improvements compared to without using segmentation.