Future smartphones will tell what’s killing your plants

A farmer in the Philippines walks through his rice paddies and sees worrying orange smears on his crops. Another in Tanzania detects white blotches on the leaves of her cassava. Worried, they hold up their cell phones, snap pictures, and instantly find out whether their plants are diseased, what the infections are, and what to do about them.

Here is the future that David Hughes envisions, and it’s slightly closer to reality. Hughes and his colleagues, Sharada Mohanty and Marcel Salathé at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, fed a computer with images of 54,000 leaves, and allowed it to learn the features that signify disease. It churned out an algorithm that could diagnose 26 different diseases in the foliage of 14 crops with almost perfect accuracy—99.35 percent.

Admittedly, this was all done using photos taken under clear lighting and standardized backgrounds. Under realistic conditions, the algorithm isn’t anywhere near as good. But the team thinks that’s just a matter of giving it a broad enough set of images to learn from.

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