Classical and Fuzzy Based Image Enhancement Techniques for Banana Root Disease Diagnosis: A Review and Validation

A vital step in automation of plant root disease diagnosis is to extract root region from the input images in an automatic and consistent manner. However, performance of segmentation algorithm over root images directly depends on the quality of input images. During acquisition, the captured root images are distorted by numerous external factors like lighting conditions, dust and so on. Hence it is essential to incorporate an image enhancement algorithm as a pre-processing step in the plant root disease diagnosis module. Image quality can be improved either by manipulating the pixels through spatial or frequency domain. In spatial domain, images are directly manipulated using their pixel values and alternatively in frequency domain, images are indirectly manipulated using transformations. Spatial based enhancement methods are considered as favourable approach for real time root images as it is simple and easy to understand with low computational complexity. In this study, real time banana root images were enhanced by attempting with different spatial based image enhancement techniques. Different classical point processing methods (contrast stretching, logarithmic transformation, power law transformation, histogram equalization, adaptive histogram equalization and histogram matching) and fuzzy based enhancement methods using fuzzy intensification operator and fuzzy if-then rule based methods were tried to enhance the banana root images. Quality of the enhanced root Article History Received: 7 April 2020 Accepted: 19 May 2020