Transfer learning by VGG-16 with convolutional neural network for paddy leaf disease classification

One of the most recent areas of research in agriculture is the detection along with classification of diseases from plant leaf images. Since rice is the most widely consumed staple food worldwide, it is crucial to increase paddy production's quality and quantity. In the production of paddy, early detection of pests and diseases at various growth stages is very important. Utilising image processing scheme to spot diseases of agricultural plants will lessen the need for farmers to safeguard agricultural products. The use of VGG-16 along with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the classification and recognition of paddy leaf diseases is proposed in this work. The rice plant leaves images taken from the kaggle dataset is utilised for the purpose of image acquisition. The Gaussian filter is used in pre-processing. The clustering technique is utilised for the segmentation of the diseased part, the normal part, and the surroundings. The proposed model is then utilised for disease classification. This study classifies 10 categories of paddy images. VGG16, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, and ResNet-152, among other transfer learning methods, are evaluated and contrasted with the experimental results. The outcome accuracy of the proposed model achieves of nearly 99.9%.