Detection of Deficiency of Nutrients in Grape Leaves Using Deep Network

It is quite natural that the crops may be affected from a number of diseases due to many factors namely, change in climate, variations in environmental changings, deficiency of urea etc. Among these factors, the deficiency of the natural nutrients is one of the common reasons that may effect on the overall production of a certain crop. The grape leaves are one of crops that are affected by the deficiency of nutrients like Potassium, Magnesium, Nitrogen and Phosphorus. Furthermore, the effects of these nutrients may have similar disorders on the grape leaves like tilting off the leaf from edges, change in color, rusting off from the root etc. and it is hard to find the identify the nutrient which is likely to be deficient in the grape leaf. In order to ensure the good quality and high production, it is necessary to design an automated system that helps in classifying the affected grape leaf in any of the four classes namely, Potassium-deficient (K-deficient), Phosphorus-deficient (P-deficient), Nitrogen-deficient (N-deficient) or Magnesium-deficient (Mg-deficient). To achieve this target, we performed a series of experiment in which we first created a dataset of grape leaves affected from the deficiency of nutrients, from the crop fields in a controlled environment. The dataset is also augmented since the data instances were not in appropriate amount to achieve the negotiable results. After preprocessing, the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) classifier is used to achieve the average individual accuracies of 77.97%, 77.74%, 81.81% and, 78.09% for K-, Mg-, P- and N-deficient grape leaves, respectively using conventional training testing ratio and while for the same sequence individual accuracies achieved are 95.95%, 92.70%, 90.91% and , 94.76% using n-fold cross validation approaches on the original dataset. These accuracies were improved when these approaches are applied on the augmented dataset. The results were also compared with recent studies concluding that our proposed approach outperformed the previous studies. Our experimental results are equally applicable and beneficial when implemented on mobile devices for getting real-time results.