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The domestication of animals and the cultivation of crops have been essential to human development throughout history, with the agricultural sector playing a pivotal role. Insufficient nutrition often leads to plant diseases, such as those affecting rice crops, resulting in yield losses of 20–40% of total production. These losses carry significant global economic consequences. Timely disease diagnosis is critical for implementing effective treatments and mitigating financial losses. However, despite technological advancements, rice disease diagnosis primarily depends on manual methods. In this study, we present a novel self-attention network (SANET) based on the ResNet50 architecture, incorporating a kernel attention mechanism for accurate AI-assisted rice disease classification. We employ attention modules to extract contextual dependencies within images, focusing on essential features for disease identification. Using a publicly available rice disease dataset comprising four classes (three disease types and healthy leaves), we conducted cross-validated classification experiments to evaluate our proposed model. The results reveal that the attention-based mechanism effectively guides the convolutional neural network (CNN) in learning valuable features, resulting in accurate image classification and reduced performance variation compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our SANET model achieved a test set accuracy of 98.71%, surpassing that of current leading models. These findings highlight the potential for widespread AI adoption in agricultural disease diagnosis and management, ultimately enhancing efficiency and effectiveness within the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to plant disease recognition is widely considered to enhance the effectiveness of such networks significantly. However, these models are nonlinear and have a high bias. To address the high bias of the single CNN model, the authors proposed an ensemble method of three lightweight CNNs models (MobileNetv2, NasNetMobile and a simple CNN model from scratch) based on a stacking generalization approach. This method has two-stage training, first, we fine-tuned and trained the base models (level-0) to make predictions, then we passed these predictions to XGBoost (level-1 or meta-learner) for training and making the final prediction. Furthermore, a search grid algorithm was used for the hyperparameter tuning of the XGBoost. The proposed method is compared to the majority voting approach and all base learner models (MobileNetv2, NasNetMobile and simple CNN model from scratch). The proposed ensemble method significantly improved the performance of plant disease classification. Experiments show that the ensemble approach achieves higher prediction accuracy (98% for majority voting and 99% for staking method) than a single CNN learner. Furthermore, the proposed ensemble method has a lightweight size (e.g., 10 × smaller than VGG16), allowing farmers to deploy it on devices with limited resources such as cell phones, internet of things (IoT) devices, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and so on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plant diseases annually cause damage and loss of much of the crop, if not its complete destruction, and this constitutes a significant challenge for farm owners, governments, and consumers alike. Therefore, identifying and classifying diseases at an early stage is very important in order to sustain local and global food security. In this research, we designed a new method to identify plant diseases by combining transfer learning and Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA). Two state-of-the-art pretrained models have been adopted for extracting features in this study, which are MobileNetV2 and ResNe50V2. Multilayer feature extraction is applied in this study to ensure representations of plant leaves from different levels of abstraction for precise classification. These features are then concatenated and passed to GSA for optimizing them. Finally, optimized features are passed to Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR) for final classification. This integration is essential for categorizing 18 different types of infected and healthy leaf samples. The performance of our approach is strengthened by a comparative analysis that incorporates features optimized by the Genetic Algorithm (GA). Additionally, the MLR algorithm is contrasted with K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN). The empirical findings indicate that our model, which has been refined using GSA, achieves very high levels of precision. Specifically, the average precision for MLR is 99.2%, while for KNN it is 98.6%. The resulting results significantly exceed those achieved with GA-optimized features, thereby highlighting the superiority of our suggested strategy. One important result of our study is that we were able to decrease the number of features by more than 50%. This reduction greatly reduces the processing requirements without sacrificing the quality of the diagnosis. This work presents a robust and efficient approach to the early detection of plant diseases. The work demonstrates the utilization of sophisticated computational methods in agriculture, enabling the development of novel data-driven strategies for plant health management, therefore enhancing worldwide food security., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2024 The Authors.)