Rice Blast Disease Recognition Using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Wan-Jie Liang,Hong Zhang,Hong-Xin Cao,Gu-Feng Zhang

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-38966-0

Abstract

Rice disease recognition is crucial in automated rice disease diagnosis systems. At present, deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is generally considered the state-of-the-art solution in image recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel rice blast recognition method based on CNN. A dataset of 2906 positive samples and 2902 negative samples is established for training and testing the CNN model. In addition, we conduct comparative experiments for qualitative and quantitatively analysis in our evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposed method. The evaluation results show that the high-level features extracted by CNN are more discriminative and effective than traditional hand-crafted features including local binary patterns histograms (LBPH) and Haar-WT (Wavelet Transform). Moreover, quantitative evaluation results indicate that CNN with Softmax and CNN with support vector machine (SVM) have similar performances, with higher accuracy, larger area under curve (AUC), and better receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves than both LBPH plus an SVM as the classifier and Haar-WT plus an SVM as the classifier. Therefore, our CNN model is a top performing method for rice blast disease recognition and can be potentially employed in practical applications.

Highlights

There exists no public dataset for rice blast disease classification
To further explore the effect of the features extracted by convolutional neural network (CNN), we conduct comparative experiment and quantitatively analyze in terms of accuracy, receiver operating characteristic (ROC), and area under curve (AUC)
support vector machine (SVM) is employed as the classifier, radial basis function (RBF) is used for the kernel function, and the grid method is used to select the optimal c and g parameters

Summary

Introduction

We establish in this work a rice blast disease dataset and use it for training and testing a disease classification model, based on convolutional neural network (CNN). With full consideration of CNN’s excellent performance, we propose a method that uses CNN for rice blast image feature extraction and disease classification, and we are able to obtain remarkable performance through fine tuning the structure and the parameters of a CNN model. We conduct comparative experiments for rice blast disease recognition with two traditional feature extraction methods, LBPH and Haar-WT.

Results

Conclusion