Image-based rice leaf disease detection using CNN and generative adversarial network

Rice is a major crop and staple food for more than half of the world’s population and plays a vital role in ensuring food security as well as the global economy pests and diseases pose a threat to the production of rice and have a substantial impact on the yield and quality of the crop. In recent times, deep learning methods have gained prominence in predicting rice leaf diseases. Despite the increasing use of these methods, there are notable limitations in existing approaches. These include a scarcity of extensive and diverse collections of leaf disease images, lower accuracy rates, higher time complexity, and challenges in real-time leaf disease detection. To address the limitations, we explicitly investigate various data augmentation approaches using different generative adversarial networks (GANs) for rice leaf disease detection. Along with the GAN model, advanced CNN-based classifiers have been applied to classify the images with improving data augmentation. Our approach involves employing various GANs to generate high-quality synthetic images. This strategy aims to tackle the challenges posed by limited and imbalanced datasets in the identification of leaf diseases. The key benefit of incorporating GANs in leaf disease detection lies in their ability to create synthetic images, effectively augmenting the dataset’s size, enhancing diversity, and reducing the risk of overfitting. For dataset augmentation, we used three distinct GAN architectures—namely simple GAN, CycleGAN, and DCGAN. Our experiments demonstrated that models utilizing the GAN-augmented dataset generally outperformed those relying on the non-augmented dataset. Notably, the CycleGAN architecture exhibited the most favorable outcomes, with the MobileNet model achieving an accuracy of 98.54%. These findings underscore the significant potential of GAN models in improving the performance of detection models for rice leaf diseases, suggesting their promising role in the future research within this domain.