A new AI-powered smartphone tool developed for banana farmers scans plants for signs of five significant diseases and one common pest. In testing in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Benin, China, and Uganda, the tool provided a 90 per cent successful detection rate. This work is a step towards creating a satellite-powered, globally connected network to control disease and pest outbreaks, say the researchers who developed the technology. The findings were published this week in the journal Plant.

Co-authors included researchers from India’s Imayam Institute of Agriculture and Technology (IIAT) and Texas A&M University.

The tool is built into an app called Tumaini – which means “hope” in Swahili – and is designed to help smallholder banana growers quickly detect a disease or pest and prevent a wide outbreak from happening. The app aims to link them to extension workers to promptly stem the epidemic. It can also upload data to a global system for large-scale monitoring and control. The app’s goal is to facilitate a robust and quickly deployable response to support banana farmers in need of crop disease control.

Rapid improvements in image-recognition technology made the Tumaini app possible. To build it, researchers uploaded 20,000 images that depicted various visible banana disease and pest symptoms. With this information, the app scans photos of parts of the fruit, bunch, or plant to determine the nature of the disease or pest. It then provides the steps necessary to address the specific condition. Besides, the app also records the data, including geographic location, and feeds it into a more massive database.

Existing crop disease detection models focus primarily on leaf symptoms and can only accurately function when pictures contain detached leaves on a plain background. The novelty in this app is that it can detect signs on any part of the crop, and is trained to be capable of reading images of lower quality, inclusive of background noise, like other plants or leaves, to maximize accuracy.