Enhanced Sea Horse Optimization with Deep Learning-based Multimodal Fusion Technique for Rice Plant Disease Segmentation and Classification

The detection of diseases in rice plants is an essential step in ensuring healthy crop growth and maximizing yields. A real-time and accurate plant disease detection technique can assist in the development of mitigation strategies to ensure food security on a large scale and economical rice crop protection. An accurate classification of rice plant diseases using DL and computer vision could create a foundation to achieve a site-specific application of agrochemicals. Image investigation tools are efficient for the early diagnosis of plant diseases and the continuous monitoring of plant health status. This article presents an Enhanced Sea Horse Optimization with Deep Learning-based Multimodal Fusion for Rice Plant Disease Detection and Classification (ESHODL-MFRPDC) technique. The proposed technique employed a DL-based fusion process with a hyperparameter tuning strategy to achieve an improved rice plant disease detection performance. The ESHODL-MFRPDC approach used Bilateral Filtering (BF)-based noise removal and contrast enhancement as a preprocessing step. Furthermore, Mayfly Optimization (MFO) with a Multi-Level Thresholding (MLT) based segmentation process was used to recognize the diseased portions in the leaf image. A fusion of three DL models was used for feature extraction, namely Residual Network (ResNet50), Xception, and NASNet. The Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network (QRNN) was used for the recognition of rice plant diseases, and its hyperparameters were set using the ESHO method. The performance of the ESHODL-MFRPDC method was validated using the rice leaf disease dataset from the UCI database. An extensive comparison study demonstrated the promising performance of the proposed method over others.