2020

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR

TRANSFORMING AGRI BUSINESS

Made By:
Abhishek Anand B2020003
Anirudh Behera B2020009
Jitendra Sharma B2020022
Sandip Ganguly B2020045
Siddharth Kumar Singh B2020054
Vatsala Shekhar B2020061

AIM Project
In Guidance Of :
Dr. Soumen Kumar Manna
Table of Contents

Executive Summary..…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..3
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..4
Organization Chart………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………5
Information Flow Chart.………………………………………………………………………………………………………………6
Identifying Stages for Implementation of AI..………………………………………………………………………………7
Creating Idea Bank……...………………………………………………………………………………………………………………9
Value Analysis of Ideas..……………………………………………………………………………………………………………12
Best Idea for Implementation……………………………………………………………………………………………………22
Creating a Prototype Design for Solution…………………………………………………………………………………..25
Productionize Prototype……………………..…………………………………………………………………………………….27
Key Integration Pipeline.……………………..……………………………………………………………………………………29
Conclusion…………………..……………………..…………………………………………………………………………………….31
References…………………..……………………..…………………………………………………………………………………….33

2
1. Executive Summary

This report aims at understanding the Agricultural business industry which focuses on the
implementation of Artificial Intelligence to increase tons of crop yield, help in boosting productivity
and increasing sustainability. The primary aim is to design and construct a model to implement it in
an idea; i.e. identify the different data sets of images and finally categorizes it into whether it’s a
heathy or diseased leaf. Method of analysis include canny edge detection, convolutional neutral
network, data augmentation, RGB and visualization.

India is a growing country with an increasing demand of food. Therefore, there is a huge challenge of
matching this demand of food when there is around 20% loss of crop yield every year. Due to low
income and minimal investments in crop health management, it’s becoming difficult to protect the
crops. This is resulting in an inclination towards the imported food and processed food which is further
deteriorating the health of people. The responsibility of saving the crops from diseases and pesticides
is a serious concern which needs to be taken care of. Moreover, a productive yield of food will
ultimately lead to the sustainability and advancement of Indian agriculture leading to development of
the economy.

It is crucial to come up with a relevant solution to this problem by understanding the changes and
diseases along with their possible outcomes. Therefore, an effective process would be to detect these
changes in crops beforehand. This could be done by categorizing it into healthy, rust, scab and multiple
diseases. Once the examination and identification of these diseases in crops is done, it would be easier
to take a well addressed decision. The purpose of this project is to provide the farmers a platform
where they can analyze their crops in a short span of time with no upfront cost and easily accessible.
The results would assess them about the actions to be taken and reduce the cost of unwanted
pesticides.

3
2. Introduction

Agriculture is one of the oldest and also one of the most important professions in the world. With the
rapid change of civilizations and technologies, humans have come a long way over how to farm and
grow crops in the world. In the current era, as the world population and land shortages continue to
grow, we need to find better solutions as to how to become more efficient while we farm while using
less land to produce more crops; thereby increasing the productivity of those farmed areas.

A $5 trillion industry worldwide, the Agri-Business industry is now requiring Artificial Intelligence
technologies to monitor soil and growing conditions, aid in yielding healthier crops, control pests, and
also improve a varied range of tasks which are related to agribusiness in the entire supply chain of
food.

Artificial Intelligence also helps to analyze farm data, with the help of the huge data points produced
daily, it can help analyze real-time data such as weather conditions, soil quality, water usage to make
better decisions and get more bountiful yields. Also, with this there is a significant improvement in
harvest quality; by prevention of over-application of fertilizers which would in turn reduce the crop
quality and increase pollution.

Also, the seasonal forecasting methods, not only help farmers make decisions by predicting upcoming
weather patterns but also it valuable for small farms in developing countries as their data and
knowledge can be used to yield more products. These small farms usually contribute to 70% of the
world’s crops. Using Computer vision and deep learning algorithms, with the help of drones helps the
farmers monitor their farms over a larger area and suggests which area of the farms require
improvements at a much faster rate over a large area than humans do.

With a lesser number of people entering the farming profession, most of the farms are facing a labor
shortage. Artificial Intelligence also helps in tackling labor shortages. With the advent of urbanization
and globalization, more people are moving out of agrarian areas. One solution to solve these shortages
could be the implementation of Artificial Intelligence agriculture bots. These bots can replace the
human effort with far greater efficiency; by processing more volume at a faster pace, and also helps
in increasing sustainability. Farmers are also using Chatbots for assistance in their workspace with
greater success.

There is nothing more fundamental than the need for food, and through the use of Artificial
Intelligence and Cognitive technologies, Agri-business can run more efficiently with fewer workers.
This will function to keep the world fed, smartly, and happily!

4
3. Organization Chart

5
4. Information Flow Chart

An Agri-business flowchart depicts all vital steps that build up an Agri-business process, which also
gives information that who is responsible for each step. This flow chart is useful for processes
improvements, analyzing, and ensuring proper communication between all process stakeholders.

Fig – Agri-Business Flow Chart (Information flow in Agri Culture, 2010)

The flowchart plays an important role in the quantification of the interrelationship among different
types of sub-component of the agribusiness system. This provides a decision-maker of a farm to yield
results in the above information chart consider various opportunities for interaction among various
stakeholders and the distribution channel and qualitative information.

Nowadays Farming is reestablished in new ways. Farm managers now need to equally pay attention
and interact with the external world as well. The external world may be an environmental effect,
quality requirement, standards, etc. Agribusiness management people and growers are both
dependent on a concise, informative rich environment because without this both stakeholders could
not gain their competitive edge. All this objective can be achieved by proper analysis and a depth study
of the information flow chart at each stage.

6
5. Identifying Stages for Implementation of AI

Artificial Intelligence is a significant change in human history, it has proven to be a factor in improving
the human lifestyle by making progress in every sector. The agriculture sector has not lagged, with the
advent of technologies like predictive modeling, image recognition, and machine learning, Artificial
Intelligence has changed the way how our food is getting produced, thus boosting efficiency and
productivity. The mentioned approaches could be beneficial in the process to generate more food for
a rising global population by also reducing the chemical inputs, respond to weather changes, solves
the issue of labor shortages, and also detects the diseases faster.

Gathering the inputs from the above information diagram, we can see at some stages where we could
apply Artificial Intelligence:

 Weather Forecast
Artificial Intelligence will use Machine Learning algorithms to predict the weather. By
processing the more complex patterns, the meteorologists can now make weather predictions
with better accuracy thereby saving time and money.

This would help the Agri industry about what type of crop varieties to plant at what time of
the year, what would be the fertilizers to be used, when to harvest the crops, etc.

 Field
Utilizing Artificial Intelligence is an efficient way of how we could conduct or monitor the
possible defects or nutrient deficiency in the soil. With the help of the image recognition
approach, Artificial Intelligence identifies the possible defects through images captured by the
camera.

With the help of Artificial intelligence Deep Learning applications, we could also analyze the
flora patterns in agriculture. Such applications help in understanding soil defects, plant pests,
and diseases.

 Robotic Machinery
The use of automated vehicles would incorporate Computer Vision, Machine Learning
Algorithms and thereby help reduce the human effort and prevent the prevalent issues found
in human farming such as fuel loss prevention, prevention of soil erosion thereby maintaining
soil quality. Machines are instrumental in improving efficiency.

Also, smart drones could be used to spray fertilizers on crops, monitor the fields, the soil
quality, the crop quality, the yields, by taking those inputs and then calculating the
productivity.

7
 Use of fertilizers in Crop Production
Using computer vision, robotics and machine learning, Artificial Intelligence and effectively
manage weeds. Instead of spraying the herbicides or fertilizers throughout the field, they can
find and spray only where the weeds are present.

This would not only help in increasing efficiency but the process will also be faster than
humans. Plus, it would lead to a reduction in the volume of the fertilizers sprayed as well as
decreases the herbicide resistance.

 Sustainability and No Pollution

The use of automated machines would require only the mentioned area of the field to be
plowed. This reduces fuel dependency, the prevention of soil erosion, and soil quality is
maintained. And also the smart drones help in spraying fertilizers efficiently thus improving
sustainability.

Also, if fertilizers are sprayed less, this would lead to less surface run-off and thus won’t
pollute water much. These are some of the ways how we could achieve sustainability and
reduce pollution.

 Research
Investing in Research and Development would help in finding new techniques to increase
efficiency in the growth of crops and their dependent factors.

A good research system would be also beneficial as it would require Artificial Intelligence
techniques to increase production thereby helping in improving the quality of food produced
thereby not risking any environmental factors.

8
6. Creating Idea Bank

Artificial Intelligence has started making a remarkable impact in the Agricultural sector. It is providing
technologies which perform a variety of task and helps in various aspects ranging from harvesting with
better productivity and crop yield to Autonomous Tractors, Controlling Pest Infestations, Soil and
Crops Health Monitoring and Precision Farming with Predictive Analytics.

The Agriculture sector is the foundation of the world’s economy and AI-enabled technologies can help
farmers get better output and production with minimal crop loss along with utilizing the land better.
AI is helping farmers to perform farming in a more efficient manner along with helping them shift
towards precise cultivation for higher crop yield.

9
Farming Data

It is a common practice now to store vast farm data on clouds which could be fed to advanced analytics
engine so that Agri-Input companies can utilize them and to customize serving farmers helping them
make better and advanced decisions to enhance the yield and productivity of the crops resulting in
less crop losses and better profitability.

Autonomous Tractors

With the recent emergence of AI and ML data in the sector, farming industry is expected to flourish at
a large scale with the usage of autonomous tractors which can be used for performing various tasks.
These driverless tractors can automatically analyze their ploughing position into the fields along with
the speed and detection of obstacles like irrigation objects, humans and animals which are required
of them to perform an efficient task.

Controlling Pest Infestations

Pests are the major concern of a farmer damaging their crops before it is harvested and stored for
human consumption. Farmers are generally affected by insects like locusts, grasshoppers and other
insects who feed on the crop which limits their profits and production. But with the implementation
of AI in farming gives the farmers an edge against the bugs.

AI will help farmers to get notified on their smartphones as soon as grasshoppers or other insects start
moving towards a particular farm or field. AI companies using the new satellite images against pictures
of the same using historical data and AI algorithm detects that the insects had landed at another
location and farmers use such information which helps them deal with the threat imminently which
also helps them save costs related to pest treatment.

10
Soil and Crops Health Monitoring

Soil Health is one of the major factors adversely affecting the production and quality of the crop which
in the long run is the deciding factor for profits as degradation of soil quality and deforestation are the
major factors which are becoming a threat for food producing countries. To tackle the issue, drones
and soil censors are used for providing information for ground-truthing irrigation decisions and fine-
tuning irrigation practices by avoiding under and over irrigation practices resulting in yield loss, water
related diseases and leach-outs.

Precision Farming with Predictive Analytics

AI applications is helping farmers by providing an accurate and controlled farming methodology and
implementation through providing proper guidance to farmers about optimum planting, water
management, crop rotation, timely harvesting, nutrient management and pest attacks.

When using the ML algorithms with the images captured by satellites and drones, AI can predict
weather conditions, analyze how the crop is most likely to sustain and check diseases, pests and
improper nutrition carried out on farms with the help of temperature, precipitation, wind speed, and
solar radiation.

11
7. Value Analysis of Ideas

a) Farming Data Value Analysis:

Accurate yield estimation for the numerous crops involved in the planning, is an essential issue
for agricultural planning intention. Data mining techniques can be used for accomplishing practical
and effective solutions for this problem. Agriculture is an obvious target for big data. Variability in
input levels, soil, environmental conditions, combinations and commodity prices have made it all
the more relevant for farmers to use information and get help for making critical farming
decisions. Analysis of agricultural data and finding effective parameters to maximize the crop yield
using data mining techniques like CLARA, PAM, DBSCAN and Multiple Linear Regression.

Some of the factors on which agriculture is dependent are climate, soil, cultivation, fertilizers,
irrigation, temperature, harvesting, rainfall, pesticide weeds and other factors.

Application of Agricultural big data for performing value analysis of farming data, using data
mining techniques:

The crops were chosen on the basis of its economic importance. However, the agriculture planning
process requires a yield estimation of several crops. Five crops were chosen for this work, using
availability of data as the key measure. Thus, a crop was selected on the basis of enough samples
of data availability in the range of 6 years under analysis. Therefore, the research is limited to 5
crops which are jowar, cotton, wheat, ground nut and rice.

Districts of Karnataka are considered for performing analysis of big data.

Below
figures depicts the different districts of Karnataka, which are having similar temperature
range, rain fall range and soil types respectively.

12
a) Districts having similar temperature range:

b) Districts having similar rain fall during 6 year duration:

c) Districts having similar soil type:

13
d) Study and analysis of wheat production in different districts of Karnataka:

PAM algorithm is applied on the dataset, initially user need to give k (Number of clusters),
where k is given as 3 in current experiment. Production of crop is classified into LOW,
MODERATE and HIGH production. Total districts are clustered into 3 clusters using method of
PAM clustering.

Crop yield in tonnes per hectare of different districts:

As a result of the analysis, maximum yield of crop are mostly in North Karnataka districts such
as Chitradurga, Bijapur, Bagalkot, Dharwad, Belgaum, Raichur, Bellary and Davangere.

e) Study and analysis of temperature and rainfall for wheat crop production in different
districts of Karnataka:

Districts of dataset are clustered into 3 clusters using CLARA algorithm. It represents the
districts which are having similar factors like production, area, rainfall and temperature.
Result of the CLARA algorithm using R is shown below.

From blow fig, we can analyze that the optimal temperature for Wheat crop production is 29.9
°C.

14
f) Application of Multiple Linear regression:

For one unit of increase in pH, the crops like Jowar, Rice, and Wheat yield will increase but
Groundnut and Cotton yield will decrease.

15
 The italicized cells are representing the insignificant independent attributes for each crop as
the values are more than 0.05. Regression Equation is formed using the independent
variables.

g) Results for optimal temperature and rainfall for wheat:

16
 b) Disease Detection (Leaves) Value Analysis:

Flipping with OpenCV, using image Augmentation technique

The images are flipped according to the values of flipCode with the help of cv function :

RGB helps in the recognition of different patterns found in the image. First, it helps in clarifying if the
image is healthy or unhealthy and, if it is unhealthy, then what kind of infection is present.

Images as Arrays (Numpy lib) :

An image is nothing but a standard Numpy array containing pixels of data points. You can think of
pixels to be tiny blocks of information arranged in the form of a 2 D grid, and the depth of a pixel refers
to the colour information present in it.

RGB:
Coloured images are represented as a combination of Red, Blue, and Green, and all the other colours
can be achieved by mixing these primary colours in the correct proportions.

Mainly, three kinds of infections are studied here:

i. Rust

Rust disease is caused by a fungal parasite that needs living plants to survive. Rust is spread
by spores that are transferred from infected plants to healthy plants. These spores can be
transferred either by the wind or by water, which is why it is important to be proactive about
treating the infection.

17
ii. Scab

Scab is the most severe fungal disease, characterized by crustaceous lesions on fruits, tubers,
leaves, or stems. Leaves are generally cupped and shrivelled in a claw-like manner. Early
infection leads to considerable yield reduction.

iii. Multiple Diseases

Here, we study if the leaf is infected by both: rust and the scab.

c) Weather Forecast Value Analysis:

Weather plays a vital role in agribusiness in terms of yielding maximum production. Crop growth,
crop development and its yield, occurrence of crop disease, required amount of water, fertilizer
requirement, and many more influenced by the weather. Weather deviation may lead to physical
damage to crops and soil erosion. The produced crop quality during movement from the farm field
to the storage house and storehouse to market heavily rely on the weather. Because poor weather
leads to bad quality of products during transportation and planting material during storage. So,
we can say that there is no quality of crop culture that is immune to the effect of weather. We can
observe the impact of weather on Agriculture.

18
 Fig – Impact of weather on agriculture (Weather Monitoring Technologies, 2020)

The occurrence of bad weather is beyond human control. But with the help of technology, it
is possible to mitigate the effects of bad weather if forecasting the expected weather can be
achieved in a given time. Here artificial intelligence plays a vital role.

Fig - Proposed weather forecasting (Weather Monitoring Technologies, 2020)

Since each solution for weather monitoring depends on data. And we are not only talking about
forecasting extreme weather like floods but regular weather conditions in the field that impact crops
day today. With the help of technologies like the internet of things, weather stations, collection of
data, and AI technology-based prediction, agriculture businesses are capable enough storing and
processing huge data sets to be prepared for weather predictions, proactive reactions fast, and
promote good weather-based management initiatives.

19
 d) Soil Sensors Value Analysis:

Soil quality is an important factor for crops to grow. There should be care taken of soil such that it
always retains its moisture, nutrient values and is not eroded. The consequences faced might be the
poor yield, poor quality of crops grown, and the soil quality being so poor that it is not used to grow
crops.

Fig. Types of Installation of Soil Sensors

Artificial Intelligence brings along with it the concept of Soil Sensors where we could monitor the water
level, the nutrient level, check for any diseases or leach outs. As evident from the above figure, we
can use the sensor to measure the different forms of soil quality in different forms of installation, like
burying it inside or outside the ground, burying it in horizontal or vertical positions, etc. based on the
needs of the user to fetch the results.

One of the most important criteria to measure the soil quality via sensors is measuring the soil
moisture. Soil Moisture is important for farming as enough moisture in soil enables the plants to
receive more water, it prevents the soil erosion and avoids breaking of the soil, as the moisture makes
the soil less dry the resistance in the soil is also less.

Below diagram below shows how the moisture content in the soil is measured concerning resistance.
It is proved that how more the content of moisture in the soil the resistance in the soil is less. It follows
an exponential curve by which the resistance and the moisture content of the soil are inversely
proportional to each other. Similarly, using Artificial Intelligence and other forms of Machine Learning

20
Algorithms, we can see how various other factors are influencing soil quality, etc. and can be used to
improve more efficiency and productivity of crops.

Fig. Sample experiment to prove how Soil Resistance and Moisture are related collected from
sensors

Fig. Soil Moisture Content of various Soils

21
8. Best idea for Implementation

Best idea:- Disease Detection of leaves, using Image Augmentation Technique

Our data consist of plant leaves which are categorised into two categories:
1. Healthy
2. Unhealthy
The healthy leaves are the leaves which do not show any sign of infection.
But the unhealthy leaves further have sub-categories:
a) Rust
b) Scab
c) Multiple Diseases

We got our datasets through Kaggle challenge which includes train, test datasets and the sample
images as given below:

Train set

We are training our model through a given train data set.

Test set

In Test dataset, we are simply giving our output and testing different kind of diseases found
in the leaves of apple trees.

22
 Below python code is used to analyse dataset:

Sample images

Technologies used in the Software are:

 Python
 Prescriptive Analysis

23
CNN
A convolutional neural network (CNN, or ConvNet) is a class of deep neural networks, most commonly
applied to analysing visual imagery. Convolutional Neural network is a type of feed - forward artificial
neural network in which the connectivity pattern between its neuron is inspired by the organization
of the animal visual cortex.

In the above equation, the kernel h is moving across the length and breadth of the image. The dot
product of h with a sub-matrix or window of matrix f is taken at each step, hence the double
summation (rows and columns).

24
9. Creating a Prototype Design for Solution

Assumptions

 There is no pre-existing solution to the problem and we have to come up with a new in-
house solution to detect changes in the pattern of leaves that lead to diseases in future.
 We already have a team of data engineers, data scientists and machine learning engineers
within the Organisation who have the required technical capabilities to come up with a
viable solution.

Technology Selection For The System’s Architecture

1) Hardware Requirements

 Mobile phones with HD cameras: Mobile phones will be placed at certain locations and
will be constantly sending images at regular intervals to the database for the images to
be processed.
 CCTV cameras: Video feed will be sent to the system containing software at regular
intervals.

2) Software Requirements

 Python Libraries: NumPy, Matplotlib, CV2 lib, TensorFlow and Pandas

 AlexNet
 YOLO software

Technology
Name Role Price
HD mobile Send images at regular intervals to the Cost per
phones database device
Send live video feeds continuously to Cost per
CCTV cameras the database device
To express images and binary raw
streams as an array of N-dimensional
NumPy real numbers Open Source
Matplotlib Data Visualisation Open Source
OpenCv Computer Vision Open Source
Data mining, data filtration and data
Pandas extraction Open Source
Machine learning and deep neural
TensorFlow networks Open Source
AlexNet Convolution Neural Networks Open Source
YOLO Real-time Image Recognition Open Source

25
Physical Architecture Diagram

Recording videos and images at

regular intervals through CCTV and phones

Image

Processing using
OpenCV

Database Analysed
Expressing images subsystem Data

And videos as

N-dimensional

Arrays Using NumPy

Storage Final decision

on leaf’s condition

Detection of

anomalies

26
10. Productionize prototype
Before launching a product, it is crucial to establish a production strategy. Creation of a new
product is difficult, but it can be simplified if we define a roadmap for the process.

Productionizing a protoype is a step in this direction.

Following are the factors to be considered before moving into the production process:

• Test demand: Crowdfunding of projects has made testing the demand for your product
easier than ever.

• Tooling, sampling & non-production release: When the design is a physical sample that
can consistently be replicated we can use the sampling process. Sampling process is a
chance to form any needed changes before sending the merchandise to production.

• Prototype of production should be fundamentally designed for mass manufacturing:

Ensuring the quality and design of the product prototype is necessary. Important to identify
flaws in this stage will save you time and money since you won’t need to make changes later
in the process.

 Creating a Successful Manufacturing Strategy:

It is important to create the best manufacturing strategy for the product in this
development stage. When creating a successful manufacturing strategy, there are several
things to stay in mind, which include:

• Links/Relationships with individuals/organizations within the market: Manufacturing of

a product needs to focus on customer needs and desires. If the merchandise doesn't provide
a benefit to customers, it's going to not sell.

• Creating a BOM (Bill of Materials): Doing this will enforce financial discipline as it will
provide an estimate of the total production cost.

• Manufacturing Setup Costs: The initial costs of sending a prototype can be expensive.

• Planning for the worst (in terms of production, shipping, and regulations): Planning for
worst-case scenarios will prepare you no matter the outcome when preparing your prototype
for manufacturing.

• Define Metrics and KPIs: These metrics are the foundation of manufacturing strategy.
Defining these metrics upfront will ensure consistent visibility throughout the manufacturing
process.

27
• Continuously Improve: Finding ways to improve production flows, inventory levels, order
fulfilment, and demand forecasting. This will ensure you are offering the highest quality
products and service.

• Time Considerations: Planning for the time it will take to go from prototyping to mass
manufacturing production is essential for a realist to market date.

• Certifications: Having certifications that may enhance your company’s credibility during
the production of your product can give you a competitive advantage.

28
11. Key Integration Pipeline

A pipeline may consist of many number of environments, but 3 environments are most commonly
used.

1) Development Environment

This enables internal developers and product managers to access the latest version the code.
According to the prototype design, our system will be predominantly using Python for
computer vision and image recognition. Thus, the first step would be to set up the required
environment on Python. For this we would require the following packages to be installed:

a) NumPy: Converts images and binary video feeds to arrays that can be analysed and stored
b) SciPy: Provides support for scientific and technical computing
c) Matplotlib: Can be used to plot the distribution of images
d) SciKit Learn: Though it is not directly related to computer vision, one can build powerful
models through it like clustering, vector quantization and computer vision
e) Open CV: It is a powerful tool for computer vision.

2) Stage Environment

It runs new code and models that will eventually become a part of the production if they pass
all quality assurance checks. For image processing there are mainly 3 stages:

 Demosaicing:

It is a digital processing algorithm that helps in reconstructing the complete image

from incomplete colour samples from the sensors.

29
 Colour Transformations:

In this step, we convert the incoming images such that it satisfies the following
conditions:

 The brightness should be a linear combination of all three RGB components.


The hue differences between the basic colours (red, green and blue) should
be 120◦
 The saturation should be 1.

 Tone Mapping:

 It varies the intensity of the image to a higher resolution.

 The production environment is the live environment that the final users will
get access. In this case, it will be the platform hosting images and videos of
the leaves showing symptoms of future diseases.

30
12. Conclusion
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) is used for image recognition and classification. This is a case of
imbalanced data, and the multiple disease category leaves are much less as compared to the other
disease categories. But this is sure to vary in a real time scenario.

As we were using RGB color gamut for CNN we found that for a healthy leaf the red and green channels
were pretty much following a normal distribution. The distribution was a bit left skewed for red and
the values were more concentrated towards a lower scale than green or blue.

While the green channel was having a right skewness to it, the image projected higher values for green
which was expected for an image with a leaf as its epicenter. But the most interesting findings was for
the blue channel which gave a much more haphazard distribution with irregular spikes here and there.

31
These variations were due to the presence of different color spots on the detected leaf (from canny
edge detection method). The general darker tunes on color generally had a higher Blue Value in RGB
spectrum and helped with the classification for healthy from unhealthy leaves.

With a robust machine learning model, we may also be able to incorporate better edge detection
methods for presence of pests also. As the product is more of an algorithm it can be implemented
using an application or a cloud-based platform which gives us scope for future improvements over
OTT updates. This can drive the costs lower in long run.

There is no involvement of upfront installation cost required to incorporate this as an agricultural

practice. For large scale/greenhouse farming the data can be retrieved from any pre-installed camera
system for surveillance, fetching data periodically for regular checkups allowing framers to adopt a
much more proactive stance than a reactive one to prevent further spread of pathogens.

Integration of conventional farming techniques with Information technology and communication

practices is bound to become a new norm. Estimated crop losses due to plant pathogens ranges
between 10 to 20% in India as per 2014 census. Even if we are able to able to reduce these unnecessary
losses by 25% with the help of our product it can retain about Rs 35000 crores for a segment of
population which really make a good from it.

32
13. References

I. https://journalofbigdata.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40537-017-0077-4
II. https://medium.com/vsinghbisen/how-ai-can-help-in-agriculture-five-applications-and-use-
cases-f09c3dc326c9
III. https://en.eijkelkamp.com/products/sensors-monitoring_uk/trime-pico.html
IV. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42934574.pdf
V. http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/engineer/facts/11-037.htm
VI. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-graph-of-soil-resistance-versus-water-content-
measured-for-two-different-soil-types_fig5_321175166
VII. https://www.kaggle.com/c/plant-pathology-2020-fgvc7/data
VIII. http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/tutorial/conv_arithmetic.html
IX. https://www.gardeningchannel.com/common-diseases-of-apple-trees/

33