Remora-CNN: A Novel and Effective Method for Rice Leaf Disease Detection and Classification

For millions of people worldwide, rice is one of the main food crops. Nevertheless, while being grown, rice is susceptible to many diseases. Most rice plant diseases are influenced by biotic and abiotic factors, including nematodes, viroids, fungus, viruses, bacteria, and other microorganisms, as well as temperature and other environmental factors. Thus, an automatic early classification of leaf disease is necessary to improve the rice yield. In this paper, for identifying and categorizing the rice leaf disease, a convolutional neural network (CNN) model is used, and the CNN is trained using the Remora Optimization Algorithm (ROA). A better classification outcome is attained by performing the segmentation process using K-means with the Fractional Tangential-Spherical Kernel (FTSK) algorithm. Furthermore, the developed Remora Optimization- Convolutional Neural Network (Remora-CNN) method achieved the optimal performance based on the testing accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 0.925, 0.931, and 0.941 using the Rice Leaf Disease Image Samples Dataset.