Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 57 (2007) 3–11

Application of artificial neural network for detecting Phalaenopsis

seedling diseases using color and texture features
Kuo-Yi Huang ∗
Department of Mechatronic Engineering, Huafan University, No. 1, Huafan Road, Shihtin Hsiang, 223 Taipei Hsien, Taiwan, ROC
Received 18 May 2005; accepted 20 January 2007

Abstract
In this study, we present an application of neural network and image processing techniques for detecting and classifying Pha-
laenopsis seedling diseases, including bacterial soft rot (BSR), bacterial brown spot (BBS), and Phytophthora black rot (PBR). The
lesion areas with BSR, PBR, and BBS of Phalaenopsis seedlings were segmented by an exponential transform with an adjustable
parameter and image processing techniques. The gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) was further used to evaluate the texture
features of the lesion area. These texture features and three color features (the mean gray level of lesion area on the R, G, and
B bands) were used in the classification procedure. A back-propagation neural network classifier was employed to classify BSR,
BBS, PBR, and OK (uninfected area of leaf) of Phalaenopsis seedlings. The methodology presented herein effectively detected and
classified these Phalaenopsis seedling lesions to an accuracy of 89.6%. The detection capability of the system, without classifying
the disease type, is as high as 97.2%.
© 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Phalaenopsis seedling diseases; Image processing; Neural network; The adjustable exponential transform (AET); Texture features; Color
features

1. Introduction

Phalaenopsis (Phalaenopsis spp.) is one of the most popular orchids in the world and has recently become a very
important export flower crop for Taiwan. Taiwan’s high temperature and humidity in summer are not favorable for orchid
growth, so Phalaenopsis is typically cultivated in greenhouses with cool air circulation. Phalaenopsis is often infested
by several diseases caused by various pathogens including fungi, bacteria and viruses. Among these diseases, bacterial
soft rot (BSR) caused by Erwinia chrysanthem (Batchelor, 1982; Bradbury, 1986; Uchida, 1994; Erwin and Ribeiro,
1996), bacterial brown spot (BBS) caused by Burkholderia cattleyae (Ark and Starr, 1951; Ark and Thmas, 1946;
Bradbury, 1986), and Phytophthora black rot (PBR) caused by Phytophthora parasitica and Phytophthora palmivora
(Erwin and Ribeiro, 1996; Ho et al., 1995; Rossetti, 1943) were most serious and caused significant economic loss
to farmers every year (Ark and Thmas, 1946; Ark and Starr, 1951; Chen and Hsieh, 1978; Chen, 1993; Wey, 1994;
Ann, 1995). Symptoms appear initially as water-soaked spots around the infected sites when the young leaves of
Phalaenopsis are infected by the soft rot bacterium. These water-soaked spots are translucent when observed from the
upper surface against light. However, the spots look much darker when observed from the lower surface, and can be

∗ Tel.: +886 2 26632102x4030; fax: +886 2 26632102x4013.

E-mail address: kuoyi.huang@msa.hinet.net.

0168-1699/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.compag.2007.01.015
4 K.-Y. Huang / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 57 (2007) 3–11

easily distinguished from the light green, healthy parts. The initial symptoms of BBS are small water-soaked circular
lesions. As the diseases progress, these circular lesions enlarge. Eventually circular or irregular dark brown or greenish
spots surrounded by a yellow halo are formed. Most of the infected plants would die if the crown or growing tips are
affected. The symptoms of PBR in Phalaenopsis are very similar to those of BBS. The early symptoms of these two
Phalaenopsis diseases cannot be easily distinguished. The only difference is the lack of yellow halo surrounding the
lesions in PBR (Wey, 1994). Color and texture features often are used to analyze the quality of images. Park et al.
(2004) proposed a method of content-based image classification using a neural network with texture features, such as
contrast, diagonal moment, energy, entropy, homogeneity, second diagonal moment, and uniformity, as input nodes.
Hsieh et al. (1997) used a neural network to recognize the growth stage of head cabbage seedlings according to nine
texture features. Guyer and Yang (2000) employed genetic artificial neural networks and spectral imaging to detect
defects for cherries. Indeed, neural networks, color and texture features were often employed in classification of plants
and crops (Tian, 1995; Cho et al., 2002; Marchant and Onyango, 2003; Morquin et al., 2003; Bodun et al., 2000;
Kavdir, 2004; Moshou et al., 2004; Granitto et al., 2005).
Histogram equalization is the most widely used algorithm for contrast enhancement because of its effectiveness and
simplicity. The histogram of the image is reformed into a different one with uniform distribution based on the original
gray level distribution of the image. Conventional methods include uniform, exponential, Rayleigh and hyperbolic
transform (Sid-Ahmed, 1995). Francis et al. (1999) proposed a constrained local histogram equalization method to
enhance the image contrast. These authors used the variational approach to reformulate the local histogram equalization.
Accordingly, the enhanced images exhibited sufficient local details as well as the correct overall appearances.
Currently, the infected Phalaenopsis seedlings are manually inspected in Taiwan. This process is laborious for the
orchid farmers. Chen (2002) reported that the labor cost was about 70% of the total cost for the Phalaenopsis culture.
The inspection process must be automated to reduce the total cost.
This study aims to design a machine vision system to automatically and correctly detect and classify the Phalaenopsis
seedling infected with BSR, BBS, and PBR. The specific goals were (1) to develop algorithms to extract the location,
color and texture features of lesion areas, and (2) to classify different diseases using the aforementioned features.

2. Materials and methods

2.1. Image acquisition system

The images were acquired using a CCD (coupled-charge device) color camera (XC-711, Sony, Japan) with a zoom
lens of 12.5–75 mm focal length (C6Z1218, Cosmicar), an image grabbing and processing board (Meter, Matrox Inc.,
Canada), and a personal computer (Intel Pentium 4 processor 2.4 GHz). Matrox Imaging Library (MIL 7.5, Matrox
Inc., Canada) was linked to the programs to grab RGB color images of 640 pixel × 480 pixel. The CCD camera was
employed for image acquisition with 4150 lx and F4.0 opening (iris diaphragm). Images were stored in the hard drive
from the format of the camera into tagged image file format (TIF). Image processing was performed using Matlab 6.5
and Visual Basic 6.0 programming.

2.2. Inoculation

Phalaenopsis seedlings (P. amabilis Strain) were provided by Taiwan Sugar Research Institute, Tainan. The inocu-
lums of B. cattleyae Pc67, E. chrysanthemum Ech1 and P. parasitica Ppa011-1 were obtained from Taitung Agricultural
Improvement Station of Council of Agriculture and Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute of Council of Agriculture,
respectively.
Diseased seedlings of Phalaenopsis were obtained by artificial inoculation of the plants with bacterial isolates. The
bacterial isolates of E. chrysanthemum and cattleyae were grown on potato dextrose agar (PDA) at 28 ◦ C for 2 days.
The bacteria were inoculated on the surface of a leaf using wound treatment. The bacteria of the soft rot pathogen
grown on PDA plates were removed and dropped onto the leaf surface; several small punctured wounds were then
made in each drop of inoculum on the inoculated leaf surface. Inoculated plants were kept in the plastic bag to retain
moisture. They were then cultivated in a controlled environment growth cabinet at 28 ◦ C for 12 h under a light intensity
of 2070 lx. Disease severity was recorded every day. The bacterial isolate of P. parasitica was grown on 5% V8 juice
agar plate at 28 ◦ C for 5 days. The mycelial agar was cut into many 5 mm × 5 mm pieces and put on the leaves of
 K.-Y. Huang / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 57 (2007) 3–11 5

Phalaenopsis seedlings. Following inoculation, the plants were kept in the plastic bag for 1 day to retain moisture. They
were then cultivated at 28 ◦ C and the symptoms of the diseases were monitored carefully. The Phalaenopsis seedlings
were inoculated with the BSR, BBS and PBR pathogens. Earliest symptoms of BSR, BBS and PBR were expected
within hours after inoculation. Same lesion areas at different times were treated as different samples.

2.3. Lesion area segmentation

Segmenting the lesion area effectively is an important procedure once the infected Phalaenopsis seedling has been
detected. However, differences between the lesion and uninfected areas (denoted as OK) are difficult to be distinguished.
Therefore, we propose the following methods to segment the lesion area. Firstly, the plant pot removal following a
segmentation algorithm (Huang and Lin., 2000) because disease area extraction will be influenced by the plant pot.
The underlining principle is using Bayes classifier to classify the leaves and pot as the object and background classes.
Secondly, the image is equalized using an exponential transform for the entire image and the rough estimated location
(REL) of lesion area is extracted using image processing techniques. Furthermore, an exponential transform with
an adjustable parameter (the adjustable exponential transform, AET) is used to enhance for the sub-image (size is
80 pixel × 80 pixel, the centroid is REL), and image processing techniques, such as hole-filling, erosion, dilation,
opening, and closing operation (Gonzalez and Woods, 1992), are used to extract an entire lesion area and obtain the
central coordinate, area, perimeter and average diameter (Dave ) of lesion area. An exponential distribution is described
by (Sid-Ahmed, 1995):
pz (z) = α e−α(z−zmin ) , z ≥ zmin (1)
and the transfer function is given by:
  r 
1
z = zmin − ln 1 − pr (x) dx (2)
α 0
where r and z represent the gray levels of the original image and enhanced output image; pr and pz are their gray level
probability density functions, α the exponential parameter, and x is the continuous random variable.
Fig. 1 shows the equalization of the lesion area image by an exponential transform. Fig. 1(a) presents the original
image of a leaf infected with BSR. The difference between lesion and uninfected (OK) areas was not obvious. An
exponential transform converted higher gray level pixels to a gray level value of 255 and equalized lower gray level
pixels within the interval [0, 255]. Then, the original image became a high contrast image, as revealed in Fig. 1(b). The
image after the AET was separated into R, G, and B color bands, as shown in Fig. 1(c)–(e). All gray levels of pixels in
the lesion area became 255 on the R and B bands, but the gray level of pixels was distributed from 0 to 255 on the G
band. The binary images (as shown in Fig. 1(f) and (g)) on the R and G bands were obtained with a threshold value of
254. Furthermore, a new image was obtained by subtracting the binary image on the G band from the one on the R band,
as indicated in Fig. 1(h). Accordingly, some isolated lesion areas in this new image were extracted by image processing
techniques (such as hole-filling, erosion, dilation, opening, and closing operators), as shown in Fig. 1(i). The parameter
α is an adjustable value according to the size of estimated lesion area (as shown in Fig. 2), and αL corresponds to the
maximum lesion area (Amax ). The isolated lesion area was then obtained by the above-mentioned procedures.

2.4. Features analysis and disease classification

Texture and color features analysis have been widely employed in classification with proper feature selections,
classifier design can be greatly simplified. Hence, we adopt texture features from the gray level co-occurrence matrix
(GLCM, Haralick et al., 1973) to classify Phalaenopsis seedling diseases—BSR, PBR and BBS. The GLCM is a N × N
square matrix, where N is the number of different gray levels in an image. An element p(i, j, d, θ) of a GLCM of
an image represents the relative frequency, where i is the gray level at location (x, y), and j represents the gray level
of neighboring pixel at a distance d and an orientation θ from location (x, y). The GLCMs of distance 1 pixel and
orientations 0◦ , 45◦ , 90◦ , and 135◦ are used for sub-image, with resolution Dave × Dave pixels.
The texture features—contrast, uniformity, maximum probability, homogeneity, inverse difference, difference vari-
ance, diagonal variance, entropy, and difference entropy of G and B bands of the lesion area are computed using
GLCMs. Mathematical formulations of texture features are given in Table 1. These texture features and three color
6 K.-Y. Huang / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 57 (2007) 3–11

Fig. 1. Lesion area extraction: (a) an original sub-image, (b) RGB image after exponential transform, (c) R gray image after exponential transform,
(d) G gray image after exponential transform, (e) B gray image after exponential transform, (f) binary image of (c), (g) binary image of (d), (h)
image (g) subtracted from image (f) and (i) isolated lesion area.

features—Rmean , Gmean and Bmean (i.e., the mean gray level of lesion area on the R, G, and B bands) will be employed
to classify Phalaenopsis seedling diseases.
Artificial neural network (ANN) has found many applications whenever a pattern recognition process is required.
In this study, a back propagation neural network (BPNN, as shown in Fig. 3) has been used to classify Phalaenopsis

Fig. 2. The AET and lesion area: (a) the relation of an adjustable parameter α and lesion area A and (b)–(e) are individually lesion area images
(pink) for α = 360, 400, 440 and 480. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of
the article.)
 K.-Y. Huang / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 57 (2007) 3–11 7

Table 1
Mathematical formulations of texture feature
Features Formula

Contrast |i − j|2 p(i, j, d, θ)

i 
i
Uniformity p(i, j, d, θ)2
i j
Maximum probability maxp(i, j, d, θ)

i,j

p(i,j,d,θ)
Homogeneity 1+|i−j|


i

j
1
Inverse difference moment of order 2 p(i, j, d, θ)
1+(i−j)2
i j

Difference variation Variance of |i − j|p(i, j, d, θ)
i j
Diagonal variance Variance of p(i, j, d, θ)

Entropy p(i, j, d, θ) log(p(i, j, d, θ))
i j
i 
Cluster tendency (i + j − 2u)2 p j , u= ip(i, j, d, θ)
i j i j

seedling diseases, including BSR, BBS and PBR. The BPNN classifier consists of three layers: an input layer, a hidden
layer, and an output layer. The input layer has 21 nodes, which are related to three color features—Rmean , Gmean and
Bmean , and 18 texture features—contrast, uniformity, maximum probability, homogeneity, inverse difference, difference
variance, diagonal variance, entropy, difference entropy of G and B bands of lesion area, normalized between 0 and 1
(pre-experiment data had shown that textures on the R band were unobvious). The output layer is made of nodes, related
to four categories—BSR, PBR, BBS and OK. Initially, the number of nodes nh in the hidden layer was calculated using
the following formula (Ward System Group, 1998):
 
ni + no
nh = + (np )0.5 (3)
2
where ni is the number of input nodes, no the number of output nodes, and np is the number of input patterns in the
training set. The objective of the learning process is to find a relation in a pattern that was made by the texture features

Fig. 3. The structure of neural the network.

8 K.-Y. Huang / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 57 (2007) 3–11

Fig. 4. Lesion area detection and classification steps.

of each lesion area. The neural network is trained and weights are changed until the error convergence criterion to 0.1.
The error signal is given by:

4 
4
E(t) = ek (t) = |dk (t) − yk (t)| (4)
k=1 k=1

where dk (t) is the desired response for neuron k (k = 1–4), and yk (t) is the output signal of neuron k at iteration t.
Fig. 3 shows the structure of a BPNN classifier (Fausett, 1994). Each texture feature is computed for different GLCMs
(orientations are 0◦ , 45◦ , 90◦ , and 135◦ ) that were established from a lesion area. The average value of texture features
are computed and used as the input nodes in the BPNN classifier, since pre-experiment tests had shown that the average
values worked more effectively than those of individual orientations.
The algorithm for Phalaenopsis disease detection and classification was developed using image processing tech-
niques, exponential transforms, and the BPNN classifier. The algorithms are described as follows:

Step 1. Lesion area segmentation:

(1) Remove the plant pot following the segmentation algorithm (Huang and Lin., 2000).
(2) Equalize the image using an exponential transform, and compute the REL of the lesion area.
(3) Equalize the sub-image (size 80 pixel × 80 pixel, the centroid is REL) using the AET, and estimate the location,
area, and average diameter of the lesion area.
Step 2. Estimate 3 color and 18 texture features of the lesion area using GLCMs.
Step 3. Establish and test the BPNN classifier to classify diseases.

The steps involved in disease detection and classification are shown in Fig. 4. The program employed for detecting
and classifying the diseases of Phalaenopsis seedling was written in Visual Basic 6.0 with a MIL 7.5 library.

3. Results and discussion

The Phalaenopsis seedlings were inoculated with the BSR, BBS and PBR pathogens. The earliest symptoms of BSR,
BBS and PBR were observed in 18, 42, and 120 h after inoculation, respectively. The same lesion areas at different
times were treated as different samples. Some inoculations did not cause any symptoms successfully. The images of
lesion areas—109 BSR, 92 BBS, and 88 PBR, were individually acquired for 9 times at 4 h intervals, 10 times at 24 h
intervals, and 8 times at 6 h intervals by a CCD camera. Three infected Phalaenopsis seedlings with BSR, BBS and
PBR were shown in Fig. 5.
A series of preliminary experiments with different values of α and zmin were conducted in an exponential transform,
and α = 350 and zmin = 0 were employed in this study. A sample was used to demonstrate the segmentation and
classification procedures. Fig. 6(a) is the original image of the Phalaenopsis seedling infected with PBR. Fig. 6(b)
shows the image without pot. Fig. 6(c) shows the image after an exponential transform. The rough estimated lesion
area was pink in color. The REL of lesion area was obtained using image processing techniques, as shown in Fig. 6(d).
The AET was used to enhance for a sub-image with the lesion area. The parameter α is adjustable, according to the
size of estimated lesion area (as shown in Fig. 2). The value of αL corresponds to the maximum lesion area (Amax ). The
isolated lesion area was obtained by the above-mentioned procedures. The location and color textures were computed
using image processing techniques. The texture features of lesion area were extracted using GLCM. Extracted color
 K.-Y. Huang / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 57 (2007) 3–11 9

Fig. 5. Three infected Phalaenopsis seedlings: (a) BSR, (b) BBS, and (c) PBR.

and texture features of the lesion area were used to classify the disease types with aBPNN classifier, and the locations
are indicated in Fig. 6(e).
One hundred and forty-five samples including 55 BSR, 44 BBS, 46 PBR, were randomly sampled from 289
inoculated images (the 50–50% splitting is used), and 40 OK areas were used to establish a BPNN classifier. Twenty-
four hidden nodes were obtained using Eq. (3) according to 21 input features, 4 output categories, and 145 input
samples. The BPNN classifier was implemented using functions of Matlab 6.5. For each configuration, the training
sample set was randomly selected from the total samples until the BPNN was convergence. Overfitting often occurs
when the training set contains some incorrectness samples in the BPNN. As the kinds of disease in training sam-
ples were already known before the training process, overfitting was unlikely to occur here. To ensure the influence
of overfitting was trivial during the training process, the maximum number of iterations was set to 10,000. Further
studies shown that same classification effect was obtained when the error rate convergence criterion was smaller
than 0.1. Only samples with diseases (54 BSR, 44 BBS, and 46 PBR) were used to test the system. The texture
features considered in the experiment are contrast, uniformity, maximum probability, homogeneity, inverse differ-
ence, difference variance, diagonal variance, entropy, and difference entropy of G and B bands of the lesion area.
The accuracies of classification were 88.8%, 90.9%, and 89.1% for BSR, BBS and PBR as presented in Table 2.
The average accuracy was 89.6%. The total numbers of correct and erroneous classifications were 129 and 15,
respectively. Thus, the detection capability of the proposed system reached 97.2% if the type of disease was not
considered.

Fig. 6. Pictorial description of the procedures of detecting and classifying diseases: (a) original image, (b) image without pot, (c) image after
exponential transform, (d) the rough estimated lesion areas and (e) detected result.
10 K.-Y. Huang / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 57 (2007) 3–11

Table 2
Classification results
Detected types Disease types

BSR (number of samples) BBS (number of samples) PBR (number of samples)

BSR 48 1 3
BBS 1 40 1
PBR 3 2 41
OK 1 0 0
Undetected 1 1 1
Classification accuracy (%) 88.8 90.9 89.1
Average accuracy (%) 89.6
Detection capability (%) 97.2

In this study, the system can detect and classify visible lesion areas with a CCD camera, but is unable to inspect
infected areas on the covered blades. In the future, we hope that the detection and classification system can be applied
in auto-observation for the growth of flowers and plants in greenhouse.

4. Conclusions

A system for detecting and classifying Phalaenopsis seedling diseases, including BSR, BBS, and PBR, was developed
in this study. The image processing techniques, AET, GLCM and the BPNN classifier were used to establish the
classification system. Lesion areas can be segmented efficiently using exponential transforms and image processing
techniques. Three color features (Rmean , Gmean and Bmean ) and 18 texture features (contrast, uniformity, maximum
probability, homogeneity, inverse difference, difference variance, diagonal variance, entropy, and difference entropy of
G and B bands of the lesion area) can be obtained. Two hundred and eighty-nine infected lesion samples obtained by
artificial inoculation were investigated. These samples were randomly divided into the training and testing data sets.
The BPNN classifier was established with 145 training samples. The system was evaluated with the testing data set.
Phalaenopsis seedling diseases can be segmented and classified efficiently using the developed system.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Taiwan Sugar Research Institute of Taiwan Sugar Corporation for providing Phalaenopsis
seedlings, and to Mr. G.C. Wey, Dr. C.C. Chen, Dr. T.F. Hsieh, Dr. P.J. Ann, Dr. D.C. Huang, Ms. S.H. Hsu, and for
their valuable suggestions.

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