Automated Rice Leaf Disease Diagnosis Using CNNs

Rice is a staple food in Bharat (India) and many other parts of the world. However, the increasing demand for rice due to population growth forces various challenges, including degraded crop quality and quantity due to rice plant diseases. Diseases such as brown spots, bacterial blight, and hispa can significantly reduce farming output, thereby impacting the productivity of the agriculture sector. To address this challenge, various solutions such as Agricultural cyber-physical systems (ACPS) and precision agriculture have been proposed, along with the application of deep learning techniques. This paper presents a rice leaf disease detection method using deep transfer learning. The proposed approach explores well-known pre-trained deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models - VGG19, DenseNet201, InceptionV3, ResNet50, EfficientNetB3, EfficientNetB7, and XceptionNet, for image-based rice disease classification. Experimental results show that the DenseNet model by the proposed method achieved the highest classification accuracy of 98.75% when fine-tuned properly. The proposed scheme outperforms many existing approaches, delivering a superior disease control solution for rice leaf diseases.