International Journal of Scientific Research and Engineering Development

Agriculture is essential and vital for global economy and ensuring food security. Indian economy is significantly agrarian and hence any decline in the yields of agriculture has a direct influence on the economy. Agricultural yields are influenced by many factors, out of which, crop diseases have a major impact and if we can monitor, predict and take preventive steps to limit disease progression, the crop yield loss can be minimized. Historically and traditionally, (crop) plant disease is primarily identified by visual inspection of the crop leaves; the leaves from plants provide early cues of infection in the form of changes in colour, shape, and texture of leaves; however this is time consuming and a tedious and arduous task if the crop area is large; it requires good knowledge and expertise of the crop disease onset and progression and the likely changes that happen on the plant’s leaves at various stages of the disease. The goal of this project is to develop a system that analyses leaves using machine learning algorithms and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in particular, to enhance the outcome by classifying whether the plant is healthy or unhealthy. Automating diagnosis process in this manner provides farmers with a fast, reliable and economical decision-making process, while also initiating timely diagnosis and reducing dependency on others to supervise the diagnosis. In future, it is proposed to use thermal imaging to capture the heat signature emitted by the leaves to identify temperature differences and heat variations which are not visible to the naked eye, to enrich the digital imaging step compared to what was adopted earlier. This approach gives us additional data and facilitates better accuracy in early detection than that of normal visual imaging.

Rajkumar L. Biradar, Sruti Varanasi, Srinayana Ragireddy, Dhanalakshmi Badani, Siri Kondapaka,"Enhanced Plant Disease Detection System Using Thermal Imaging" International Journal of Scientific Research and Engineering Development, V9(2): Page(1538-1543) Mar-Apr 2026. ISSN: 2581-7175. www.ijsred.com. Published by Scientific and Academic Research Publishing.