Identification of rice diseases using deep convolutional neural networks

Abstract The automatic identification and diagnosis of rice diseases are highly desired in the field of agricultural information. Deep learning is a hot research topic in pattern recognition and machine learning at present, it can effectively solve these problems in vegetable pathology. In this study, we propose a novel rice diseases identification method based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) techniques. Using a dataset of 500 natural images of diseased and healthy rice leaves and stems captured from rice experimental field, CNNs are trained to identify 10 common rice diseases. Under the 10-fold cross-validation strategy, the proposed CNNs-based model achieves an accuracy of 95.48%. This accuracy is much higher than conventional machine learning model. The simulation results for the identification of rice diseases show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.