Classify Rice Disease Using Self-Optimizing Models and Edge Computing with Agricultural Implications

Abstract

Rice continues to be a primary food for the world’s population. Over its complex history, dating as far back as 8,000 B.C., there have been agricultural challenges, such as a variety of diseases. A consequence of disease in rice plants may lead to no harvest of grain; therefore, detecting disease early and providing expert remedies in a low-cost solution is highly desirable. In this article, we study a pragmatic approach for rice growers to leverage artificial intelligence solutions that reduce cost, increase speed, improve ease of use, and increase model performance over other solutions, thereby directly impacting field operations. Our method significantly improves upon prior methods by combining automated feature extraction for image data, exploring thousands of traditional machine learning configurations, defining a search space for hyper-parameters, deploying a model using edge computing field usability, and suggesting remedies for rice growers. These results prove the validity of the proposed approach for rice disease detection and treatments.