Multiclass Classification of Paddy Leaf Diseases Using Random Forest Classifier

With increase in population, improving the quality and quantity of food is essential. Paddy is a vital food crop serving numerous people in various continents of the world. The yield of paddy is affected by numerous factors. Early diagnosis of disease is needed to prevent the plants from successive stage of disease. Manual diagnosis by naked eye is the traditional method widely adopted by farmers to identify leaf diseases. However, when the task involves manual disease diagnosis, problems like the hiring of domain experts, time consumption, and inaccurate results will arise. Inconsistent results may lead to improper treatment of plants. To overcome this problem, automatic disease diagnosis is proposed by researchers. This will help the farmers to accurately diagnose the disease swiftly without the need for expert. This manuscript develops model to classify four types of paddy leaf diseases bacterial blight, blast, tungro and brown spot. To begin with, the image is preprocessed by resizing and conversion to RGB Red, Green and Blue (RGB) and Hue, Saturation and Value (HSV) color space. Segmentation is done. Global features namely: hu moments, Haralick and color histogram are extracted and concatenated. Data is split in to training part and testing part in 70:30 ratios. Images are trained using multiple classifiers like Logistic Regression, Random Forest Classifier, Decision Tree Classifier, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) Classifier, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA),Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Gaussian Naive Bayes. This study reports Random Forest classifier as the best classifier. The Accuracy of the proposed model gained 92.84% after validation and 97.62% after testing using paddy disordered samples. 10 fold cross validation is performed. Performance of classification algorithms is measured using confusion matrix with precision, recall, F1- score and support as parameters.