Identification of Soybean Foliar Diseases Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Images

Soybean has been the main Brazilian agricultural commodity, contributing substantially to the country's trade balance. However, foliar diseases are the key factor that can undermine the soy production, usually caused by fungi, bacteria, viruses, and nematodes. This letter proposes a computer vision system to track soybean foliar diseases in the field using images captured by the low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle model DJI Phantom 3. The proposed system is based on the segmentation method Simple Linear Iterative Clustering to detect plant leaves in the images and on visual attributes to describe the features of foliar physical properties, such as color, gradient, texture, and shape. Our methodology evaluated the performance of six classifiers for different heights, including 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 m. Experimental results showed that color and texture attributes lead to higher classification rates, achieving the precision of 98.34% for heights between 1 and 2 m, with a decay of 2% at each meter. Results indicate that our approach can support experts and farmers to monitor diseases in soybean fields.