Fungal Infection in Potato Tuber Using Thermal Imaging

Potato dry rot is one of the most detrimental diseases affecting on potato tubers caused by Fusarium Solani fungus. In order to prevent the expansion of potato dry rot and the losses caused by this disease, the fungi must be detected and destroyed. The common methods for detecting contaminations are time-consuming, expensive and painstaking. In this study, a fast and reliable method has been presented based on active thermography technology. This method was used to detect the healthy tubers from contaminated ones and to classify the different stages of contamination (1 to 9 day after infection). In the active thermography, two heating temperature levels and four cooling time levels were applied on the samples. The results of variance analysis and compare mean of the average temperature differences between the surfaces of the healthy and contaminated tubers indicated that 90 oC heating temperature and 40 s cooling time of the samples was the best treatment for detecting healthy and contaminated tubers. For evaluating the classifier performance, statistical indicators such as accuracy, precision, sensitivity and specificity were calculated. The total accuracy of the classifier was 96.67%.