Chandigarh University develops AI based app to detect crop disease

This will help the farmers to make arrangements before the spread of disease in the healthy crops.

To rescue the Indian farmers from the increasing crop loss problem due to pests and diseases, Department of Research & Development of Chandigarh University has come forward with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based mobile application which will detect the crop diseases at an early stage of farming cycle. This will help the farmers to make arrangements before the spread of disease in the healthy crops. Scientist F of SEED, NCSTC Division, Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi, Dr Rashmi Singh launched the mobile app along with Dean Research, Chandigarh University Prof Sanjeet Singh.   

While giving details about the mobile app, the inventor and project scientist of Chandigarh University, Amit Verma said, “The diseases like cut worms, potato tuber moth are common in potatoes. Early and Late Blight in Tomatoes severely damage the crop. To overcome from these and many other diseases, this detecting application can be used to identify and detect the illness in these crops in order to increase agricultural production.” 

Amit Verma explained that the mobile application works on three step disease detection which is based on Image Processing which matches the current picture of the crop with that of disease infected crop. Using the pattern matching technique the app prompts any significant change in the leaves, stems or branches. In addition, the mobile app offers suggestions to further treat the disease based upon the stage of the crop damaged by the pests and insects. The app will be able to detect 39 diseases in two crops while the study to extend the detection for 19 more crops is currently under-process. 

Dr Rashmi Sharma, DST Scientist F (SEED, NCSTC Division) department of Science and Technology, New Delhi, said that Chandigarh University has performed quintessentially well in terms of research and this shows the great character of Chandigarh University towards the society as this application is going to help millions of farmers across Punjab and India. 

This will help the farmers to make