RiceDRA-Net: Precise Identification of Rice Leaf Diseases with Complex Backgrounds Using a Res-Attention Mechanism

In this study, computer vision applicable to traditional agriculture was used to achieve accurate identification of rice leaf diseases with complex backgrounds. The researchers developed the RiceDRA-Net deep residual network model and used it to identify four different rice leaf diseases. The rice leaf disease test set with a complex background was named the CBG-Dataset, and a new single background rice leaf disease test set was constructed, the SBG-Dataset, based on the original dataset. The Res-Attention module used 3 x 3 convolutional kernels and denser connections compared with other attention mechanisms to reduce information loss. The experimental results showed that RiceDRA-Net achieved a recognition accuracy of 99.71% for the SBG-Dataset test set and possessed a recognition accuracy of 97.86% on the CBG-Dataset test set. In comparison with other classical models used in the experiments, the test accuracy of RiceDRA-Net on the CBG-Dataset decreased by only 1.85% compared with that on the SBG-Dataset. This fully illustrated that RiceDRA-Net is able to accurately recognize rice leaf diseases with complex backgrounds. RiceDRA-Net was very effective in some categories and was even capable of reaching 100% precision, indicating that the proposed model is accurate and efficient in identifying rice field diseases. The evaluation results also showed that RiceDRA-Net had a good recall ability, F1 score, and confusion matrix in both cases, demonstrating its strong robustness and stability.