Classification Method of Significant Rice Pests Based on Deep Learning

Rice pests are one of the main factors affecting rice yield. The accurate identification of pests facilitates timely preventive measures to avoid economic losses. Some existing open source datasets related to rice pest identification mostly include only a small number of samples, or suffer from inter-class and intra-class variance and data imbalance challenges, which limit the application of deep learning techniques in the field of rice pest identification. In this paper, based on the IP102 dataset, we first reorganized a large-scale dataset for rice pest identification by Web crawler technique and manual screening. This dataset was given the name IP_RicePests. Specifically, the dataset includes 8248 images belonging to 14 categories. The IP_RicePests dataset was then expanded to include 14,000 images via ARGAN data augmentation technique to address the difficulties in obtaining large samples of rice pests. Finally, the parameters trained on the public image ImageNet dataset using VGGNet, ResNet and MobileNet networks were used as the initial values of the target data training network to achieve image classification in the field of rice pests. The experimental results show that all three classification networks combined with transfer learning have good recognition accuracy, among which the highest classification accuracy can be obtained on the IP_RicePests dataset via fine-tuning the parameters of the VGG16 network. In addition, following ARGAN data augmentation the dataset demonstrates high accuracy improvements in all three models, and fine-tuning the VGG16 network parameters obtains the highest accuracy in the augmented IP_RicePests dataset. It is demonstrated that CNN combined with transfer learning can employ the ARGAN data augmentation technique to overcome difficulties in obtaining large sample sizes and improve the efficiency of rice pest identification. This study provides foundational data and technical support for rice pest identification.