Enhancing Rice Crop Management: Disease Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Mobile Application Integration

Early diagnosis of rice disease is important because it poses a considerable threat to agricultural productivity as well as the global food security of the world. It is challenging to obtain more reliable outcomes based on the percentage of RGB value using image processing outcomes for rice disease detections and classifications in the agricultural field. Machine learning, especially with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), is a great tool to overcome this problem. But the utilization of deep learning techniques often necessitates high-performance computing devices, costly GPUs and extensive machine infrastructure. As a result, this significantly raises the overall expenses for users. Therefore, the demand for smaller CNN models becomes particularly pronounced, especially in embedded systems, robotics and mobile applications. These domains require real-time performance and minimal computational overhead, making smaller CNN models highly desirable due to their lower computational cost. This paper introduces a novel CNN architecture which is comparatively small in size and promising in performance to predict rice leaf disease with moderate accuracy and lower time complexity. The CNN network is trained with processed images. The image processing is performed using segmentation and k-means clustering to remove background and green parts of affected images. This technique proposes to detect rice disease of rice brown spot, rice bacterial blight and leaf smut with reliable outcomes in disease classifications. The model is trained using an augmented dataset of 2700 images (60% data) and validated with 1200 images of disease-affected samples to identify rice disease in agricultural fields. The model is tested with 630 images (14% data); testing accuracy is 97.9%. The model is exported into a mobile application to introduce the real-life application of the outcome of this work. The model accuracy is compared to others work associated with this type of problem. It is found that the performance of the model and the application are satisfactory compared to other works related to this work. The over-all accuracy is notable, showing the reliability and dependability of this model to classify rice leaf diseases.