The identification and quantification of diseases in leaves must be accurate to increase crop productivity and precision agriculture. However, the classical segmentation approaches normally adopt the depiction in single color space and standard clustering algorithms and generally are feeble in the context of varying lighting and compound leaf textures. To address them, this paper will recommend an adaptive K-means clustering system with multi-color space fusion which will be viable in terms of leaf disease segmentation and the severity of the disease. The specified strategy combines the strengths of RGB, HSV, and CIELab colour spaces into the form of a hybrid strategy that enhances the level of discrimination. The optimal number of clusters is estimated by a dynamic adaptive K-means algorithm to facilitate the centroid start-up and reliable separation of different samples. The other component that is incorporated in the framework is the severity quantification module which entails a pixel level analysis to ascertain the disease progression with greater precision. They are tested on the images of potato and tomato leaves obtained as a part of the PlantVillage Dataset and other samples to verify the hypothesis. The segmentation accuracy of the proposed is 97.2, Dice coefficient is 0.94 and Intersection-over-Union (IoU) is 89.6, which is more than 10 percent higher than the conventional clustering methods. Moreover, the error in the severity estimation is kept to a minimum of less than 3 percent which is very reliable. The findings prove that the proposed framework offers a computationally effective, precise, and scalable solution to the automated plant disease analysis in real-world agricultural systems.
Keywords
Adaptive K-Means Clustering, Multi-Color Space Fusion, Leaf Disease Segmentation, Severity Quantification, Precision Agriculture, Plant Village Dataset.
S. M. Javidan, A. Banakar, K. A. Vakilian, and Y. Ampatzidis, “Diagnosis of grape leaf diseases using automatic K-means clustering and machine learning,” Smart Agricultural Technology, vol. 3, p. 100081, Feb. 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.atech.2022.100081.
M. Jamjoom, A. Elhadad, H. Abulkasim, and S. Abbas, “Plant Leaf Diseases Classification Using Improved K-Means Clustering and SVM Algorithm for Segmentation,” Computers, Materials & Continua, vol. 76, no. 1, pp. 367–382, 2023, doi: 10.32604/cmc.2023.037310.
V. K. Trivedi, P. K. Shukla, and A. Pandey, “Automatic segmentation of plant leaves disease using min-max hue histogram and k-mean clustering,” Multimedia Tools and Applications, vol. 81, no. 14, pp. 20201–20228, Mar. 2022, doi: 10.1007/s11042-022-12518-7.
V. Viswanathan and K. Murugasamy, “Modified ensemble machine learning-based plant leaf disease detection model with optimized K-Means clustering,” Network: Computation in Neural Systems, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 161–205, Dec. 2024, doi: 10.1080/0954898x.2024.2435492.
Md. A. R. Nishad, M. A. Mitu, and N. Jahan, “Predicting and Classifying Potato Leaf Disease using K-means Segmentation Techniques and Deep Learning Networks,” Procedia Computer Science, vol. 212, pp. 220–229, 2022, doi: 10.1016/j.procs.2022.11.006.
M. Nawaz et al., “A robust deep learning approach for tomato plant leaf disease localization and classification,” Scientific Reports, vol. 12, no. 1, Nov. 2022, doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-21498-5.
M. A. Bhatti, “Advanced Plant Disease Segmentation in Precision Agriculture Using Optimal Dimensionality Reduction with Fuzzy C-Means Clustering and Deep Learning,” IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, vol. 17, pp. 18264–18277, 2024, doi: 10.1109/jstars.2024.3437469.
G. Storey, Q. Meng, and B. Li, “Leaf Disease Segmentation and Detection in Apple Orchards for Precise Smart Spraying in Sustainable Agriculture,” Sustainability, vol. 14, no. 3, p. 1458, Jan. 2022, doi: 10.3390/su14031458.
F. G. Waldamichael, T. G. Debelee, and Y. M. Ayano, “Coffee disease detection using a robust HSV color‐based segmentation and transfer learning for use on smartphones,” International Journal of Intelligent Systems, vol. 37, no. 8, pp. 4967–4993, Nov. 2021, doi: 10.1002/int.22747.
S. Kumar Sahu and M. Pandey, “An optimal hybrid multiclass SVM for plant leaf disease detection using spatial Fuzzy C-Means model,” Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 214, p. 118989, Mar. 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2022.118989.
M. Shoaib et al., “Deep learning-based segmentation and classification of leaf images for detection of tomato plant disease,” Frontiers in Plant Science, vol. 13, Oct. 2022, doi: 10.3389/fpls.2022.1031748.
W. B. Demilie, “Plant disease detection and classification techniques: a comparative study of the performances,” Journal of Big Data, vol. 11, no. 1, Jan. 2024, doi: 10.1186/s40537-023-00863-9.
S. Hasan, S. Jahan, and Md. I. Islam, “Disease detection of apple leaf with combination of color segmentation and modified DWT,” Journal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences, vol. 34, no. 9, pp. 7212–7224, Oct. 2022, doi: 10.1016/j.jksuci.2022.07.004.
N. Upadhyay and N. Gupta, “SegLearner: A segmentation based approach for predicting disease severity in infected leaves,” Multimedia Tools and Applications, vol. 84, no. 34, pp. 42523–42546, Apr. 2025, doi: 10.1007/s11042-025-20838-7.
D. Aqel, S. Al-Zubi, A. Mughaid, and Y. Jararweh, “Extreme learning machine for plant diseases classification: a sustainable approach for smart agriculture,” Cluster Computing, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 2007–2020, Nov. 2021, doi: 10.1007/s10586-021-03397-y.
O. Mzoughi and I. Yahiaoui, “Deep learning-based segmentation for disease identification,” Ecological Informatics, vol. 75, p. 102000, Jul. 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.ecoinf.2023.102000.
M. Astani, M. Hasheminejad, and M. Vaghefi, “A diverse ensemble classifier for tomato disease recognition,” Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, vol. 198, p. 107054, Jul. 2022, doi: 10.1016/j.compag.2022.107054.
CRediT Author Statement
The authors confirm contribution to the paper as follows:
Conceptualization: Anandakumar Haldorai;
Methodology: Anandakumar Haldorai;
Software: Bui Hong Quang;
Data Curation: Bui Hong Quang;
Writing- Original Draft Preparation: Anandakumar Haldorai and Bui Hong Quang;
Investigation: Anandakumar Haldorai and Bui Hong Quang;
Supervision: Anandakumar Haldorai and Bui Hong Quang;
Validation: Anandakumar Haldorai and Bui Hong Quang;
Writing- Reviewing and Editing: Anandakumar Haldorai and Bui Hong Quang. All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.
Acknowledgements
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript.
Ethics Declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
Availability of Data and Materials
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.
Author Information
Contributions
All authors have equal contribution in the paper and all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Corresponding Author
Anandakumar Haldorai
Centre for Future Networks and Digital Twin, Sri Eshwar College of Engineering, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India.
This license permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, reproduction, and adaptation in any medium or format, including for commercial purposes, provided that appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and the source, a link to the license is provided, and any changes made are indicated.
Anandakumar Haldorai and Bui Hong Quang, “Adaptive K-Means Clustering with Multi Color Space Fusion for Robust Leaf Disease Segmentation and Severity Quantification”, Journal of Smart and Sustainable Farming, pp. 001-011, 2026, doi: 10.64026/JSSF/2026001.