Robust Deep Neural Network for Classification of Diseases from Paddy Fields

Agriculture in India supports millions of livelihoods and is a major force behind economic expansion. Challenges in modern agriculture depend on environmental factors (such as soil quality and climate variability) and biotic factors (such as pests and diseases). These challenges can be addressed by...

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Main Authors: Karthick Mookkandi, Malaya Kumar Nath
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-07-01
Series:AgriEngineering
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2624-7402/7/7/205
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author Karthick Mookkandi
Malaya Kumar Nath
author_facet Karthick Mookkandi
Malaya Kumar Nath
author_sort Karthick Mookkandi
collection DOAJ
description Agriculture in India supports millions of livelihoods and is a major force behind economic expansion. Challenges in modern agriculture depend on environmental factors (such as soil quality and climate variability) and biotic factors (such as pests and diseases). These challenges can be addressed by advancements in technology (such as sensors, internet of things, communication, etc.) and data-driven approaches (such as machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL)), which can help with crop yield and sustainability in agriculture. This study introduces an innovative deep neural network (DNN) approach for identifying leaf diseases in paddy crops at an early stage. The proposed neural network is a hybrid DL model comprising feature extraction, channel attention, inception with residual, and classification blocks. Channel attention and inception with residual help extract comprehensive information about the crops and potential diseases. The classification module uses softmax to obtain the score for different classes. The importance of each block is analyzed via an ablation study. To understand the feature extraction ability of the modules, extracted features at different stages are fed to the SVM classifier to obtain the classification accuracy. This technique was experimented on eight classes with 7857 paddy crop images, which were obtained from local paddy fields and freely available open sources. The classification performance of the proposed technique is evaluated according to accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, F1 score, MCC, area under curve (AUC), and receiver operating characteristic (ROC). The model was fine-tuned by setting the hyperparameters (such as batch size, learning rate, optimizer, epoch, and train and test ratio). Training, validation, and testing accuracies of 99.91%, 99.87%, and 99.49%, respectively, were obtained for 20 epochs with a learning rate of 0.001 and sgdm optimizer. The proposed network robustness was studied via an ablation study and with noisy data. The model’s classification performance was evaluated for other agricultural data (such as mango, maize, and wheat diseases). These research outcomes can empower farmers with smarter agricultural practices and contribute to economic growth.
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spelling doaj-art-8b18dca22ebe445a96c4c66cc15572512025-08-20T03:36:15ZengMDPI AGAgriEngineering2624-74022025-07-017720510.3390/agriengineering7070205Robust Deep Neural Network for Classification of Diseases from Paddy FieldsKarthick Mookkandi0Malaya Kumar Nath1Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Puducherry, Karaikal 609609, IndiaDepartment of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Puducherry, Karaikal 609609, IndiaAgriculture in India supports millions of livelihoods and is a major force behind economic expansion. Challenges in modern agriculture depend on environmental factors (such as soil quality and climate variability) and biotic factors (such as pests and diseases). These challenges can be addressed by advancements in technology (such as sensors, internet of things, communication, etc.) and data-driven approaches (such as machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL)), which can help with crop yield and sustainability in agriculture. This study introduces an innovative deep neural network (DNN) approach for identifying leaf diseases in paddy crops at an early stage. The proposed neural network is a hybrid DL model comprising feature extraction, channel attention, inception with residual, and classification blocks. Channel attention and inception with residual help extract comprehensive information about the crops and potential diseases. The classification module uses softmax to obtain the score for different classes. The importance of each block is analyzed via an ablation study. To understand the feature extraction ability of the modules, extracted features at different stages are fed to the SVM classifier to obtain the classification accuracy. This technique was experimented on eight classes with 7857 paddy crop images, which were obtained from local paddy fields and freely available open sources. The classification performance of the proposed technique is evaluated according to accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, F1 score, MCC, area under curve (AUC), and receiver operating characteristic (ROC). The model was fine-tuned by setting the hyperparameters (such as batch size, learning rate, optimizer, epoch, and train and test ratio). Training, validation, and testing accuracies of 99.91%, 99.87%, and 99.49%, respectively, were obtained for 20 epochs with a learning rate of 0.001 and sgdm optimizer. The proposed network robustness was studied via an ablation study and with noisy data. The model’s classification performance was evaluated for other agricultural data (such as mango, maize, and wheat diseases). These research outcomes can empower farmers with smarter agricultural practices and contribute to economic growth.https://www.mdpi.com/2624-7402/7/7/205inceptionresidualdeep learningMCCpaddy crop diseases
spellingShingle Karthick Mookkandi
Malaya Kumar Nath
Robust Deep Neural Network for Classification of Diseases from Paddy Fields
AgriEngineering
inception
residual
deep learning
MCC
paddy crop diseases
title Robust Deep Neural Network for Classification of Diseases from Paddy Fields
title_full Robust Deep Neural Network for Classification of Diseases from Paddy Fields
title_fullStr Robust Deep Neural Network for Classification of Diseases from Paddy Fields
title_full_unstemmed Robust Deep Neural Network for Classification of Diseases from Paddy Fields
title_short Robust Deep Neural Network for Classification of Diseases from Paddy Fields
title_sort robust deep neural network for classification of diseases from paddy fields
topic inception
residual
deep learning
MCC
paddy crop diseases
url https://www.mdpi.com/2624-7402/7/7/205
work_keys_str_mv AT karthickmookkandi robustdeepneuralnetworkforclassificationofdiseasesfrompaddyfields
AT malayakumarnath robustdeepneuralnetworkforclassificationofdiseasesfrompaddyfields