A classification model based on depthwise separable convolutional neural network to identify rice plant diseases

Every year a number of rice diseases cause major damage to crop around the world. Early and accurate prediction of various rice plant diseases has been a major challenge for farmers and researchers. Recent developments in the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made image processing techniques more convenient and precise. Motivated from that in this research, a depthwise separable convolutional neural network based classification model has been proposed for identifying 12 types of rice plant diseases. Also, 8 different state-of-the-art convolution neural network model has been fine-tuned specifically for identifying the rice plant diseases and their performance has been evaluated. The proposed model performs considerably well in contrast to existing state-of-the-art CNN architectures. The experimental analysis indicates that the proposed model can correctly diagnose rice plant diseases with a validation and testing accuracy of 96.5% and 95.3% respectively while having a substantially smaller model size