Prediction of Rice Leaf Diseases at an Early Stage Using Deep Neural Networks

Rice is the major crop in India, and India has been the biggest exporter and the second-largest producer in the entire world, so it is heavily reliant on rice for its economy and food supply. There has been an increase in rice production from 53.6 million tons in fiscal to 120 million tons over the last 40 years. Healthy and proper rice plant growth is required to maintain food production and supply in accordance with people’s needs and demands. The major diseases affecting these rice plants are leaf blast, hispa, and brown spot. The advancement of deep learning paved the way for these diseases to be detected using computer vision. Many researches have been conducted in the detection of rice leaf diseases, where the rice leaves have been deeply affected at a later stage. In this chapter, we propose an effective deep learning model for an early-stage disease detection of rice leaves. The proposed model was developed by an ensemble of the pretrained DenseNet-201 with the Naïve Inception module. The model was trained and tested over a Rice Diseases Image dataset; it attained an overall disease detection accuracy of 87.69% and surpasseed the existing models.