2015 IEEE International Conference on Technological Innovations in ICT for Agriculture and Rural Development (TIAR 2015)
Automated Color Prediction of Paddy Crop Leaf
using Image Processing
Amandeep Singh
Department of Electronics Technology,
Guru Nanak Dev University
Amritsar, India
amandeep.singh.sodha@gmail.com
Abstract-In India a majority of the population in rural areas is
working in the agriculture field for their livelihood. They not only
have to struggle for the better yield against the natural disasters
but also have to tackle the losses of the net output because of land
fertilization specifications and unskilled labour too. In the event of
inadequate utilities and resources, in the face of unpredictable
crises, their gain opportunities and livelihood are proportionally
and adversely affected. However in this era of technology, the
scenario may get changed as the Information and Communication
and related fields of technology are providing a great for such type
of crisis handling. Here in this paper, the method which may be
used to compare the crop leaf color with the leaf color chart (LCC),
has been proposed for getting a detail about the requirement of
plant, before enough to get the yield affected. By making use of
image processing technology a simple and robust method for the
color prediction of paddy crop plant has been discussed along with
the mathematical modelling which may provide a great platform to
the advisory bodies in the agriculture field for the atomization of
the crop health problems and solutions.
Keywords: Leaf Color Chart (LCC), Hue, Histogram, Correlation
coefficient
I. INTRODUCTION
There are a lot of plant diseases which are found to be
present in the crop fields because of the land fertilizer and
mineral specifications, environmental conditions and many
more miscellaneous factors. The most of these diseases are
because of malnutrition and can be tackled by taking care of
above mentioned parameters. For instance in case of paddy crop
which is the one of major agriculture grain being produced and
consumed in India, the health of the plant and ultimately the
grain quality are dependent on various minerals like urea,
nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium etc. Because of the inadequate
amounts of such types of the minerals and fertilizers, the crop
plant health gets adversely affected and results in the change of
the leaf color of plant. An important tool for the prediction of
color corresponding to good plant health is leaf color chart
(LCC), provided by various agriculture advisory bodies. The
LCC consists of the various shades of green varying from the
light green towards dark green, telling about the health status at
different ages of plant. However till date there is no such a
method has been developed to characterize the plant leaf color
to predict the health of the plant automatically by its comparison
with the LCC. This paper aims the same target proposing an
algorithm which has been developed on MATLAB platform for
978-1-4799-7758-1/15/$31.00 2015 IEEE
Maninder Lal Singh
Department of Electronics Technology,
Guru Nanak Dev University
Amritsar, India
mlsingh7@gmail.com
the automatic prediction of plant leaf color by its comparison
with LCC. After knowing the color shade of the plant, this
algorithm can be programmed to give the suggestions regarding
the health status of plant and hence crop.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
A lot of work has been done in the field of agriculture by
the researchers to facilitate the farmers.
Savita N. Ghaiwat and Parul Arora has beautifully
summarized the techniques used for plant disease detections by
various researchers such as BP Neural network based, Support
vector based Machine based, K- Mean clustering based and
many more[1]. Android platform base application has been
developed by Van Joshua L. Abergos, Philip Zesar Boreta etal.,
for the automatic prediction of nitrogen content of paddy plant.
The application was developed using bitwise operations and
results were authenticated via Z-Test approximations showing
an average accuracy of 80% [2].
Image processing based automatic counting of rice plant
hoppers was done by Yao Qing, Ding-xiang, etal. in 2014 based
on the Haar Feature Extraction of plant [3]. Hiteshwari Sibrol
and Satish Kumar has presented their review work, based on K-
means clustering and thresholding for wheat disease detection
[4].
Other than the agriculture based research, the work has also
been brought to new heights in the field of image processing for
application oriented programmes.
Sion Hannuna1 , N. Anantrasirichai etal. has shown
their earnings in this area of application of image processing by
designing an agriculture disease mitigation system. A lot of
work starting from the image acquisition, computer vision
system, color correction, illumination standardization and then
proceeding with transformation matrices has been concluded
with the calculation of EMD for various image acquisition
devices [5].
Other than above a very brief but impressive summary
about DIP techniques used for detection, quantification and
classification has been published by Jayme Gracia Arnal
Barbedo [6]. The author has covered many technological
parameters like dual segmented regression analysis, neural
networks, and color analysis. Fuzzy logic, discrimination
analysis etc. concluding that image processing techniques can
provide enough potential solution to the problems to be missed.
Sindhuja Sankaran, Ashish Mishra, Reza Ehsani and Cristina
Davis has also done a very nice review of advanced techniques
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2015 IEEE International Conference on Technological Innovations in ICT for Agriculture and Rural Development (TIAR 2015)
for detecting plant diseases [7]. A hyper spectral image based
technique, for early detection of rice blast (Pyricularia) at
seedling stage in Nipponbare rice variety has been proposed by
Yan Yang, Rongyao Chai and Yong He. A wavelength based
analysis has been provided representing spectral characteristic
of seedlings [8]. Other than the above the research is going on
by various individuals in the field, based on various techniques
such as digital morphometrices [9], Affine Transformations
Edge Detection and Pixel Comparison [10], gradient based
features [11], Fractel Dimension Analysis [12].
III. METHODOLOGY AND DATA COLLECTION
The research has been carried out using the real time images
of paddy plants and a MATLAB generated leaf color chart. The
LCC was designed in such a way that the all shades of green
could lie in the range. By following a well-mannered
methodology the objectives of the research were achieved.
Following flow chart provides a brief about the flow of research:
STAR
T As hue changes from 0 to 100%, the corresponding
Get the Images to be analysed
Color Yes
Convert to HSV
space
color Space
conversion
required..?
N
Get the image part to be processed
o
was collected from the paddy fields, on weekly basis throughout
the crop season. This data has not only been used for the current
research but can also be used in the achievements of future
research goals. Second major problem of LCC was solved by the
utility of LCC and Crop Fertilizer Information [13] provided by
Punjab Agriculture University (PAU Ldh.) to the farmers.
However the LCC used for this research purpose has been
designed in MATLAB in accordance with the information
provided in the brochure [13]. Here initializing from position 1
to 6, the shades are named as: 1) Lightest Green 2) Lighter Green
3) Average Green 4) Dark Green 5) Darker Green 6) Darkest
Green respectively. The same has been shown in Fig. 2.
The next step was to get the test image data in true color
format so that it can be processed with maximum accuracy. Now
as the image acquisition devices capture the image in RGB
format, which is not same as the phenomenon of retina of human
eye. So if the processing is done in RGB mode, its results may
differ from the actual ones, raising the validation problems. A
solution to this is that convert the test image to the HSI (Hue,
Saturation, Intensity or Value) color space [14]. Fig. 3 explains
all the information in visual form.
colors also vary from red via yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta
and again back to red, so that there are actually red values both
at 0 and 100%. As saturation is varied from 0 to 100%, the
corresponding colors (hue) vary from unsaturated (shades of
gray) to fully saturated (no white component). As value or
brightness/Intensity, varies from 0 to 100%, the corresponding
colors become increasingly brighter.

Image Morphological Masking

compressio Operations and ROI
n/Cropping
Selection

Generation of database (LCC)

Fig. 2. Leaf Color Chart

Compare the test image with database

Compare Test data with the database

Found Best
Match..? N
Yes o

Accuracy Calculation & Result

Authentication
Stop
Fig. 3. Illustration of HSI color space
Fig. 1. Overview of methodology adopted
The conversion of RGB to HSI color space has been
After getting started, the very first step is to get the done as follows [14]:
information to be processed (The test images) and the
information to be used as reference (The LCC). So a lot of data

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2015 IEEE International Conference on Technological Innovations in ICT for Agriculture and Rural Development (TIAR 2015)

={ (1)
360 >
1/2[()+()]
With = cos 1 {(_________________________________
2 1/2
) (2)
[(_) +()()]

The Saturation component is given by:

3
= [1 (++)] [min(, , )] (3)

Finally the Intensity/Value component can be calculated as: Fig. 5. Compressed Image with loss of color information

1
= 3 ( + + ) (4) Test Image in RGB Conversion to
format binary Image
For the above mentioned conversions it has been assumed that
RGB values has been normalized between 0 to 1 and the angle
theta is measured with respect to the red axis of HSI color space.
Hue value can be normalized to [0, 1] by dividing all values by Coordinate
360o from the equation (1). The other two components will Inversion of binary image
Localization for
already be in the range if RGB values are already normalized to and size calculation
non zero Pixels
[0, 1].
Image compressions, morphological operations and
masking etc. are the secondary steps to be done for getting a
Logical Mapping of
precise and quick response. To make the compatibility of Cropping from Non RGB Image onto 2D
MATLAB compilers, only the portion of the image was selected Zero Coordinates Image
which contains the leaf. This proven to be a very adequate step
towards the overall performance of the algorithm. However the
popular, lossy compression techniques (Such as JPEG
compression) were not used because compression comes at a
cost, reducing the color information which cant be Rejecting Zero Getting RGB data
compromised as it leads to imprecise results. For instance, the valued pixels from from mapped image
result of compression on a single test image has been shown Image
which clearly led to the rejection of compression of data.
After neglecting the idea of compression, the next
Fig. 6. Block Diagram for Cropping Mechanism
method for the image data collection was cropping. As the
cropping can be done manually but for the automation of data selection a hybrid model of cropping (using 2D masking and
then shifting to the cropping of RGB/HSI image) was used
which produced very satisfactory results. Block diagram for this
logical and conditional programming based model has been
shown in Fig. 6.
Final step was to get rid of noise, before feeding the test
image to the algorithm. In MATLAB platform for the said
purpose there are mainly three commands used for
morphological operations are available which are summarized
as [15]:
Fig. 4. Uncompressed Image 1. bwareaopen(im1,4)
It fills the open areas whose size is less than four
pixels. It uses a brush of four pixels (which is user
defined).
2. imopen(imname,strel('disk',2))
It uses a brush of size 2 pixels (User defined) for
filling up the areas which are open at any end.
3. imfill(imname,'holes')

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2015 IEEE International Conference on Technological Innovations in ICT for Agriculture and Rural Development (TIAR 2015)
This fills white holes in a given image (Here in this
syntax imname is the variable carrying image
information).

IV. DATA ANALYSIS

The basic approach for data analysis is the histogram
calculation and interpretation. A histogram gives a graphical
representation of color value and the number of pixels
corresponding to a particular color value. This fact has been used
as the backbone of the research and the histograms of Hue
component of reference data (Six shades of LCC) and test data
are calculated. The histograms of Red, Green and Blue
components and Saturation and Intensity components has also
been calculated. But as the information producing accurate
results lie in the Hue component only as the brain and human
retina respond to hue of scene, so the decisions are based and
limited up to the analysis of Hue histograms only. Fig. 9. Inverted Binary Noise free Image

Before getting to the histograms and final results, here

are the previous data which has been deducted from the original
data images. Starting from the unprocessed original image to the
final image and its various component images are shown below
in a sequential manner:
Fig. 10. Mapped & Cropped Test Image in RGB Color Space

Fig. 11. Test Image in HSI Color Space (Ready to be processed)

Fig. 12. Hue Component of Test Image

Fig. 7. Original Unprocessed Image

Fig. 13. Saturation Component of Test Image

Fig. 8. Binary Image (Noisy)

Fig. 14. Intensity Component of Test Image

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2015 IEEE International Conference on Technological Innovations in ICT for Agriculture and Rural Development (TIAR 2015)
Fig. 15. Histogram of Hue Component of Test Image
Here in the above plot, along the x-axis, only that portion of Hue
values has been shown which has non zero count values (That
Fig. 16. Histogram of Hue Component of LCC (All Shades)
is the portion where the maximum hue information lies). The
remaining axis count from 0-20 and 90-255 has been skipped.
In the same manner the histograms of LCC shades has
been calculated and plotted as shown in Fig. 16.
V. DECISION MAKING AND
AUTHENTICATION
The main observation here to make is that the
maximum number of pixel count (other than zero hue value,
which corresponds to black background in the test image being
processed) is maximum at Hue value 53 and is a unique number.
On the other hand when same observation was made for LCC
histogram plot, it was found that corresponding to 53 Hue value,
the shade Lighter Green has maximum pixel count, declaring
that the test image has best match with Lighter Green shade of
LCC.
If in case test image hue value comes out to be, for
example 51, then there will not be any exact match with the LCC
hue values where there is the maxima. This ambiguity has been
resolved by making the assumption that the nearest value of the
Hue will be having the best match. That is:
Best Matching Hue Value = min[|HT-Hi|] , 1 i 6 (5)
Where HT Hue value of Test image with maximum count of
pixels.
HiHue values of LCC shades (One to Six) with
maximum count of pixels.
Next and final step is the validation of the results obtained and
hence accuracy. For this sake the correlation between the two
sequences of histograms has been calculated as it is one of the
most familiar measures of relations between two random
sequences. It can obtained by dividing the covariance the two
variables by the product of their standard deviations as below:
(,) [( )( )]
Corr(x,y) = = (6)
When the analysis has to be done on a series of n measurements
of X and Y written as xi and yi where i =1, 2, 3, 4, ..., n, then
the sample correlation coefficient can be used to estimate the
correlation r between X and Y. The sample correlation
coefficient has been calculated as:
(7)
Where x and y are the mean values corresponding to X and Y,
sx and sy are the sample standard deviations of X and Y. Thus
equation (7) can be written as:
(8)
Following the above statistical approach the correlation between
the observed histogram and the LCC histograms has been
calculated respectively, which are presented and discussed in the
following section.
VI. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
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2015 IEEE International Conference on Technological Innovations in ICT for Agriculture and Rural Development (TIAR 2015)
The developed algorithm was tested over a range of test
images, belonging to different shades of LCC. The algorithm has
produced very impressive results as given on the next page.
When the correlation between the two histogram data was
calculated, the peak value observed was to be treated as the best
match value and algorithmic results were found to be exact the
same in all cases.
Other than the correlation statistics, one more test Chi
Square Goodness of Fit was done, whose parametric result
corresponding to the null hypothesis should be equal to zero. The
test statistic value, is a chi-square random variable (2) defined
by the following equation.
2 = [ (Oi - Ei)2 / Ei ] (9)
Ei Expected value of the histogram sequence
The test returns a test decision for the null hypothesis
that the data in vector or matrix being tested comes from a
certain distribution with a mean and variance estimated from that
variable. The alternative hypothesis is that the data does not
come from such a distribution. The parametric value is 1 if the
test rejects the null hypothesis at the 5% (or may be user defined)
significance level, and is zero otherwise, when the hypothesis is
accepted.
A complete result table for different inputs along with
the parameters for various statistics has been given accompanied
by the percentage efficiency of the algorithm.

Where Oi Observed value of the histogram sequence

TABLE I. COMPLETE RESULTS

S. Test Image* Correlation Value of Test Image Histogram Chi Square Whether the Best Accuracy
No. with all Histograms of LCC Goodness of Null Matching
Fit Test hypothesis Shade Given
[h value has been by
calculated in accepted or Algorithm
MATLAB] rejected

Color of LCC Correlation Value

with Test Image
1. Lightest Green 0.2285 H=0 Accepted Lighter Green 100%
Lighter Green 0.4779
Average Green -0.0142

Dark Green -0.0170

Darker Green -0.0176

Darkest Green -0.0169

2. Lightest Green 0.1195 H=0 Accepted Lightest 100%

Green
Lighter Green 0.0256
Average Green -0.0129

Dark Green -0.0130

Darker Green -0.0134
Darkest Green -0.0129
3. Lightest Green -0.0116 H=0 Accepted Darkest 100%
Green
Lighter Green -0.0116

Average Green -0.0092

Dark Green -0.0088
Darker Green -0.0073
Darkest Green -0.0057

4. Lightest Green -0.0092 H=0 Accepted 100%

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2015 IEEE International Conference on Technological Innovations in ICT for Agriculture and Rural Development (TIAR 2015)
Lighter Green 0.0188 Average
Green
Average Green 0.4640
Dark Green -0.0132
Darker Green -0.0151
Darkest Green -0.0144

5. Lightest Green -0.0090 H=0 Accepted Darker Green 100%

Lighter Green -0.0090

Average Green -0.0088

Dark Green 0.0083

Darker Green 0.3562

Darkest Green 0.1773
6. Lightest Green -0.0115 H=0 Accepted Dark Green 100%
Lighter Green -0.0114

Average Green -0.0091

Dark Green -0.0086
Darker Green -0.0072

Darkest Green -0.0058

Overall no. of Samples Tested: 06 Mathematically True & Tested: 06 Overall Accuracy of Algorithm: 100%

Test Image*: All the data has been captured in normal day light (Uncontrolled Illumination Conditions). In this concern the
thresholding has been done at different values varying from 40 to 50, used while cropping of test image. However with controlled
illumination it can be avoided.
Fig. 18. Final plot of Histograms for Test Image 2

Fig. 17. Final plot of Histograms for Test Image 1

Fig. 19. Final plot of Histograms for Test Image 3

In the above figure, it is very clearly observed that

there is a large difference between the two values of hue for the
test image and the matching one from LCC. The assumption
made in this case is that I the maximum hue color value can be
88. All the values lying above this will be treated as a part of
the darkest shade of green in the LCC. However the constraints
can be imposed on the illumination conditions, thresholding
values and hence the Hue of the test image to be in a limited
proportion of concerned shade of LCC. Other than it saturation
and intensity values of image can, too, deviate the output from
the actual one if not handled properly.

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2015 IEEE International Conference on Technological Innovations in ICT for Agriculture and Rural Development (TIAR 2015)
Fig. 20. Final plot of Histograms for Test Image 4
Fig. 21. Final plot of Histograms for Test Image 5
Fig. 22. Final plot of Histograms for Test Image 6
VII. CHALLENGES
The most significant challenge faced during the work
was capturing the quality images with maximum detail of the
leaf color. It is very typical task to get the image with all the
details within a processable memory. Such images are formed
a through high resolution and thus are of 6-10MB of size. This
was handled by using a Nikon made D5200 camera which
served the task very well.
Second challenge faced was to get rid of illumination
conditions as from the start to the end of paddy crop season,
illumination varies a lot even when the image acquiring time is
fixed. However the solution to this is variable user defined
thresholding and making necessary adjustments to the shades
of LCC. A more convenient and appropriate solution to it has
been discussed in next section.
VIII. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper a new algorithm has been proposed and
implemented for detection of color of paddy crop plant in
reference with leaf color chart (LCC), before enough to get rid
of any crop disease. At a glance results shows that
A simplified, accurate and robust technique.
Working on real time environmental conditions.
Correlation parameters calculation verifying the
accuracy.
A novel approach in the field of agriculture for paddy
crop.
Checking about future aspects, after verification of the
result in different environment conditions, it can be
implemented in real time live projects and can be made
adaptable/hybrid model with genetic algorithms or neuro-fuzzy
optimization techniques. Woking on controlled illumination
conditions and getting results in lab environment and detection
of disease based on color and pattern, is in progress.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by Electronics and Communication
Department of Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, Punjab,
by providing excellent laboratories (Computer Lab) and
MATLAB software for the development and testing of the
algorithm.
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