Quality Assessment of Rice Using Convolution Neural Networks and Other Machine Learning Techniques- A Comparative Study

Rice holds its position as the most widely cultivated crop worldwide, its demand steadily rising alongside population growth. The precise identification of grains, especially wheat and rice, holds significant importance as their ultimate utilization depends on the quality of grains prior to processing. Traditionally, grain identification tasks have been predominantly manual, relying on experienced grain inspectors and consuming considerable time. However, this manual classification process is susceptible to variations influenced by individual perception, given the subjective nature of human image interpretation. Consequently, there is an urgent need for an automated recognition system capable of accurately identifying grains under diverse environmental conditions, necessitating the application of digital image processing techniques. In this study, we focus on grading five distinct varieties of rice based on their quality, employing a range of convolution neural networks (CNN) namely, Efficientnetb0, Googlenet, MobileNetV2, Resnet50, Resnet101, and ShuffleNet. The performance of CNN towards identification and grading of rice grain is also compared to that of other parametric and Non-parametric classifiers namely, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN), Naive Bayes (NB), and Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) using Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Gray Level Run Length Matrix (GLRLM) based texture features. The image dataset comprises five grades of rice, each containing 100 images, resulting in a comprehensive collection of 500 samples for analysis. It is observed that, Convolution neural networks can grade five different qualities of rice with highest accuracy of 64.4% in case of GoogleNet. Results show that, rice grading using texture features performs better with highest accuracy of 99.2% (using GLCM) and 93.4% (using GLRLM).