A large percentage of Colombia’s economic activity corresponds to the agricultural sector. In this sector, plantains rank second in production and planted area. However this crop is affected by different diseases, among which The Black Sigatoka stands out, caused by the fungus Mycosphaerella fijiensis. The disease highly reduces the production level of the crop and although there are prevention measures that allow reducing the incidence of the disease, there’s a lack of support for small producers in Colombia, who do not have technological tools to support the disease detection processes. This article outlines the development of a support system for the detection of black sigatoka using digital images. For this, a characterization process of the agricultural user is carried out, then, a machine learning methodology is implemented to classify the disease on a mobile device. The support system is validated through laboratory tests, field tests and the feedback from the agricultural user.

In this paper we present a methodology for the automatic recognition of black Sigatoka in commercial banana crops. This method uses a LeNet convolutional neural network to detect the progress of infection by the disease in different regions of a leaf image; using this information, we trained a decision tree in order to classify the level of infection severity. The methodology was validated with an annotated database, which was built in the process of this work and which can be compared with other state-of-the-art alternatives. The results show that the method is robust against atypical values and photometric variations.