Cercospora leaf spot (CLS) poses a high economic risk to sugar beet production due to its potential to greatly reduce yield and quality. For successful integrated management of CLS, rapid and accurate identification of the disease is essential. Diagnosis on the basis of typical visual symptoms is often compromised by the inability to differentiate CLS symptoms from similar symptoms caused by other foliar pathogens of varying significance, or from abiotic stress. An automated detection and classification of CLS and other leaf diseases, enabling a reliable basis for decisions in disease control, would be an alternative to visual as well as molecular and serological methods. This paper presents an algorithm based on a RGB‐image database captured with smartphone cameras for the identification of sugar beet leaf diseases. This tool combines image acquisition and segmentation on the smartphone and advanced image data processing on a server, based on texture features using colour, intensity and gradient values. The diseases are classified using a support vector machine with radial basis function kernel. The algorithm is suitable for binary‐class and multi‐class classification approaches, i.e. the separation between diseased and non‐diseased, and the differentiation among leaf diseases and non‐infected tissue. The classification accuracy for the differentiation of CLS, ramularia leaf spot, phoma leaf spot, beet rust and bacterial blight was 82%, better than that of sugar beet experts classifying diseases from images. However, the technology has not been tested by practitioners. This tool can be adapted to other crops and their diseases and may contribute to improved decision‐making in integrated disease control.

We introduce a novel set of features for a challenging image analysis task in agriculture where cell phone camera images of beet leaves are analyzed as to the presence of plant diseases. Aiming at minimal computational costs on the cellular device and highly accurate prediction results, we present an efficient detector of potential disease regions and a robust classification method based on texture features. We evaluate several first-and second-order statistical features for classifying textures of leaf spots and we find that a combination of descriptors derived on multiple erosion bands of the RGB color channels, as well as, the local binary patterns of gradient magnitudes of the extracted regions accurately distinguish between symptoms caused by five diseases, including infections of the fungi Cercospora beticola, Ramularia beticola, Uromyces betae, and Phoma betae, and the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae pv. aptata.

Modern communication and sensor technology coupled with powerful pattern recognition algorithms for information extraction and classification allow the development and use of integrated systems to tackle environmental problems. This integration is particularly promising for applications in crop farming, where such systems can help to control growth and improve yields while harmful environmental impacts are minimized. Thus, the vision of sustainable agriculture for anybody, anytime, and anywhere in the world can be put into reach. This chapter reviews and presents approaches to plant disease classification based on cell phone images, a novel way to supply farmers with personalized information and processing recommendations in real time. Several statistical image features and a novel scheme of measuring local textures of leaf spots are introduced. The classification of disease symptoms caused by various fungi or bacteria are evaluated for two important agricultural crop varieties, wheat and sugar beet.

Modern communication and sensor technology coupled with powerful pattern recognition algorithms for information extraction and classification allow the development and use of integrated systems to tackle environmental problems. This integration is particularly promising for applications in crop farming, where such systems can help to control growth and improve yields while harmful environmental impacts are minimized. Thus, the vision of sustainable agriculture for anybody, anytime, and anywhere in the world can be put into reach. This chapter reviews and presents approaches to plant disease classification based on cell phone images, a novel way to supply farmers with personalized information and processing recommendations in real time. Several statistical image features and a novel scheme of measuring local textures of leaf spots are introduced. The classification of disease symptoms caused by various fungi or bacteria are evaluated for two important agricultural crop varieties, wheat and sugar beet.