Reducing the use of pesticides by early visual detection of diseases in precision agriculture is important. Because of the color similarity between potato-plant diseases, narrow band hyper-spectral imaging is required. Payload constraints on unmanned aerial vehicles require reduc-
tion of spectral bands. Therefore, we present a methodology for per-patch classification combined with hyper-spectral band selection. In controlled
experiments performed on a set of individual leaves, we measure the performance of five classifiers and three dimensionality-reduction methods with three patch sizes. With the best-performing classifier an error rate of 1.5%
is achieved for distinguishing two important potato-plant diseases.