AI fight banana disease
Context
Banana is one of the most grown food crops across the world, and disease outbreaks can be devastating to large populations. Today, a new smartphone tool integrated into an app is currently being tested for detecting major diseases in bananas. The app is named Tumaini and means “hope” in Swahili and can detect banana diseases that threaten the livelihood of the fruit like the Xanthomanas wilt of banana, Fusarium wilt, and black leaf streak (or Black sigatoka)
Solution
The models, which are now being built into an app, scan plants for signs of five major diseases and one common pest allowing smallholder farmers to not only detect problems but share findings on a wider scale to help prevent the spread of outbreaks.
Impact
This significant high success rate makes the model a useful early disease and pest detection tool, and this research could be further extended to develop a fully automated mobile app to help millions of banana farmers in developing countries,” said the findings, published in the Plant Methods journal on 12 August
Tumaini provided a 90 percent successful disease detection rate. Findings of the study were published in Plant Methods