Automatic diagnosis of rice plant diseases using VGG-16 and computer vision

Abstract

Pathogens are organisms that cause disease in plants. In the case of rice, these pathogens can include fungi, bacteria, nematodes, protozoa, and viruses. This study aims to investigate rice plant diseases using a hybrid system that employs the visual geometry group-16 (VGG-16) architecture and computer vision techniques, alongside various optimization algorithms and hyperparameters. We utilize the convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture of VGG-16 for feature extraction, implementing a process known as transfer learning. Additionally, this research compares different optimization algorithms with the VGG-16 model to identify the most effective optimization for the CNN architecture applied to the tested dataset. The main contribution of this study is the development of a model for identifying rice plant diseases based on data collected using VGG-16 for feature extraction and neural networks for classification with specific parameters. Our findings indicate that the best optimization algorithm is stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum, achieving training and validation loss results of 0.173 and 0.168, respectively. Furthermore, the training and validation accuracies were 0.95 and 0.957. The model’s performance metrics include an accuracy of 95.75, precision of 95.75, recall of 95.75, and an F1-score of 95.73.