An accurate and timely detection of diseases and pests in rice plants can help farmers in applying timely treatment on the plants and thereby can reduce the economic losses substantially. Recent developments in deep learning based convolutional neural networks (CNN) have greatly improved image classification accuracy. In this paper, we present deep learning based approaches to detect diseases and pests in rice plants using images captured in real life scenario. We have experimented with various state-of-the-art CNN architectures on our large dataset of rice diseases and pests collected manually from the field, which contain both inter-class and intra-class variations and have nine classes in total. The results show that we can effectively detect and recognize rice diseases and pests using CNN with the best accuracy of 99.53 on test set using CNN architecture, VGG16. Though the accuracy of CNN models built on VGG16 or other similar architectures is impressive, these models are not suitable for mobile devices due to their large size having a huge number of parameters. To solve this problem, we propose a new CNN architecture, namely stacked CNN, that exploits two stage training to reduce the size of the model significantly while at the same time maintaining high classification accuracy. Our experimental results show that we achieve 95 test accuracy with stacked CNN, while reducing the model size by 98 compared to VGG16. This kind of memory efficient CNN architectures can contribute in rice disease detection and identification based mobile application development.
Plant Diseases and Pests are a major challenge in the agriculture sector. An accurate and a faster detection of diseases and pests in plants could help to develop an early treatment technique while substantially reducing economic losses. Recent developments in Deep Neural Networks have allowed researchers to drastically improve the accuracy of object detection and recognition systems. In this paper, we present a deep-learning-based approach to detect diseases and pests in tomato plants using images captured in-place by camera devices with various resolutions. Our goal is to find the more suitable deep-learning architecture for our task. Therefore, we consider three main families of detectors: Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN), Region-based Fully Convolutional Network (R-FCN), and Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD), which for the purpose of this work are called “deep learning meta-architectures”. We combine each of these meta-architectures with “deep feature extractors” such as VGG net and Residual Network (ResNet). We demonstrate the performance of deep meta-architectures and feature extractors, and additionally propose a method for local and global class annotation and data augmentation to increase the accuracy and reduce the number of false positives during training. We train and test our systems end-to-end on our large Tomato Diseases and Pests Dataset, which contains challenging images with diseases and pests, including several inter- and extra-class variations, such as infection status and location in the plant. Experimental results show that our proposed system can effectively recognize nine different types of diseases and pests, with the ability to deal with complex scenarios from a plant’s surrounding area.