A novel fine-tuned deep-learning-based multi-class classifier for severity of paddy leaf diseases

INTRODUCTION: Paddy leaf diseases have a catastrophic influence on the quality and quantity of paddy grain production. The detection and identification of the intensity of various paddy infections are critical for high-quality crop production. METHODS: In this paper, infections in paddy leaves are considered for the identification of illness severity. The dataset contains both primary and secondary data. The four online repositories used for secondary data resources are Mendeley, GitHub, Kaggle and UCI. The size of the dataset is 4,068 images. The dataset is first pre-processed using ImageDataGenerator. Then, a generative adversarial network (GAN) is used to increase the dataset size exponentially. The disease severity calculation for the infected leaf is performed using a number of segmentation methods. To determine paddy infection, a deep learning-based hybrid approach is proposed that combines the capabilities of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and support vector machine (SVM). The severity levels are determined with the assistance of a domain expert. Four degrees of disease severity (mild, moderate, severe, and profound) are considered. RESULTS: Three infections are considered in the categorization of paddy leaf diseases: bacterial blight, blast, and leaf smut. The model predicted the paddy disease type and intensity with a 98.43% correctness rate. The loss rate is 41.25%. DISCUSSION: The findings show that the proposed method is reliable and effective for identifying the four levels of severity of bacterial blight, blast, and leaf smut infections in paddy crops. The proposed model performed better than the existing CNN and SVM classification models.