Abstract: Early pest detection is a major challenge in agriculture field. The easiest way, to control the pest infection is the use of pesticides. But the excessisive use of pesticides are harmful to plants, animals as well as human beings. Integrated pest management combines biological and physical methods to prevent pest infection. The techniques of machine vision and digital image Processing are extensively applied to agricultural science and it have great perspective especially in the plant protection field, which ultimately leads to crops management. This paper deals with a new type of early detection of pests system. Images of the leaves affected by pests are acquired by using a digital camera. The leaves with pest images are processed for getting a gray colored image and then using feature extraction, image classification techniques to detect pests on leaves. The images are acquired by using a digital camera . The images are then transferred to a PC and represented in MATLAB software. The RGB image is then converted into gray scale image and the feature extraction techniques are applied on that image. The Support Vector Machine classifier is used to classify the pest types.

Keywords: Early pest detection, feature extraction, image processing, pests, SVM (Support Vector Machine).