Expert Systems With Applications 169 (2021) 114514

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Expert Systems With Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

Identification of rice plant diseases using lightweight attention networks

Junde Chen , Defu Zhang *, Adnan Zeb, Yaser A. Nanehkaran
School of Informatics, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Rice is one of the most important crops in the world, and most people consume rice as a staple food, especially in
Rice disease identification Asian countries. Various rice plant diseases have a negative effect on crop yields. If proper detection is not taken,
Transfer learning they can spread and lead to a significant decline in agricultural productions. In severe cases, they may even cause
Convolutional neural networks
no grain harvest entirely, thus having a devastating impact on food security. The deep learning-based CNN
Image classification
methods have become the standard methods to address most of the technical challenges related to image
identification and classification. In this study, to enhance the learning capability for minute lesion features, we
chose the MobileNet-V2 pre-trained on ImageNet as the backbone network and added the attention mechanism
to learn the importance of inter-channel relationship and spatial points for input features. In the meantime, the
loss function was optimized and the transfer learning was performed twice for model training. The proposed
procedure presents a superior performance relative to other state-of-the-art methods. It achieves an average
identification accuracy of 99.67% on the public dataset. Even under complicated backdrop conditions, the
average accuracy reaches 98.48% for identifying rice plant diseases. Experimental findings demonstrate the
validity of the proposed procedure, and it is accomplished efficiently for rice disease identification.

1. Introduction
The world’s population is expected to increase by 2 billion persons in
the next 30 years, from 7.7 billion currently to 9.7 billion in 2050, and
can peak at nearly 11 billion around 2100 (www.un.org). The majority
of the world’s population regards rice as the primary grain, and it is the
source of a substantial portion of total calories for over half the earth’s
population. Nevertheless, rice plants are quite susceptible to various
diseases as well. The occurrence of diverse rice plant diseases has a
negative impact on crop growth, and if the rice plant diseases are not
detected in time, they may cause a disastrous effect on food security
(Mohanty et al., 2016). Early prediction and warning can suppress the
outbreaks of rice plant diseases and reduce the unnecessary usage of
pesticides (Picon et al., 2019). It plays a key role to ensure the effective
yields of rice plants, but so far, the visual observations of experienced
producers or plant specialists are still the primary approach to diagnose
rice plant diseases in many areas, especially in developing countries.
When a particular rice disease spreads, plant protection specialists or
technicians from corresponding agencies appointed by governments
approach farmers to advise the necessary actions. Although some crop
disease outbreaks can be prevented by this means, there are not
adequate plant disease specialists compared with the number of farmers
in many areas. In addition, due to social or economic reasons, few people
are engaged in plant protection originally. Hence, there are significant
needs and realistic importance to construct a simple, fast, less expensive,
and accurate system to automatically identify rice plant diseases.
In recent years, a new way of crop disease identification has been
evolved with the improvement of digital cameras and computational
capacity. Computer vision technology has become an attractive
approach for continuous monitoring of crop diseases due to its low cost,
visualization capability, and contact-free approach (Bai et al., 2018).
Much attention has been paid to the research and application of image
processing and machine learning (ML), and specific classifiers are usu­
ally employed to classify plants into healthy or diseased types (Li et al.,
2013; Prajapati et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2018). For example, Kahar
et al. (2015) used an artificial neural network (ANN) to detect three
varieties of rice plant diseases, including leaf blight, leaf blast, and
sheath blight, and their classifier achieved an accuracy of 74.21%.
Through extracting grey level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) texture
features, Gharge et al. (2016) trained a backpropagation neural network

The code (and data) in this article has been certified as Reproducible by the CodeOcean: https://codeocean.com. More information on the Reproducibility Badge
Initiative is available at https://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/computer-science/journals.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: chen2wo@126.com (J. Chen), dfzhang@xmu.edu.cn (D. Zhang), adnanzeb@stu.xmu.edu.cn (A. Zeb), artavil20@gmail.com (Y.A. Nanehkaran).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2020.114514
Received 11 August 2020; Received in revised form 16 December 2020; Accepted 17 December 2020
Available online 5 January 2021
0957-4174/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
J. Chen et al. Expert Systems With Applications 169 (2021) 114514

(BPNN) to identify soybean diseases such as frogeye, downy mildew, Table 1

and bacterial pustule; they attained an accuracy of 93.30%. Singh et al. The crucial features of rice plant diseases.
(2015) employed the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to ID Disease The rice disease characteristics Sample
recognize healthy and diseased rice plants, and achieved an accuracy of Name size
Shape Color Location
82%. Song et al. (2007) used radial basis kernel function in SVM to
identify 3 varieties of maize diseases; a total of 262 images were divided 1 Rice Oval or Tan, grey-white Rice leaf 42
stackburn Circular macular
into training and test sets in their experiment, and they reached the best spots
recognition accuracy of 89.6%. Sharif et al. (2018) reported a 2 Rice leaf Short strip Angular black spots Rice leaf 61
Multi-Class SVM to classify the six types of citrus diseases, including smut or block
anthracnose, black spot, canker, scab, greening, and melanose, and they 3 Rice leaf Strip or Light tan and dark Rice leaf 57
scald watery stain brown spots
achieved 97% classification accuracy. More recently, deep learning
form
techniques and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), particularly 4 Rice false Spores on Orange to greenish- Rice ears 46
deep CNNs, have been widely used in image identification and classifi­ smut grains black
cation, and are becoming the leading methods to overcome the chal­ 5 Rice blast Diamond- Center: gray; Margin: Leaf, 219
lenges of digital image processing (Dargan et al., 2019; Kessentini et al., shaped dark brown stem,
lesions on collars
2019; Khamparia et al., 2020). Ferentinos (2018) trained a deep affected
learning model to recognize a set of 58 distinct classes of plant and areas
disease combinations, including healthy plants; their trained model 6 Rice stem Long strip Gray to black Stems 50
achieves an accuracy of 99.53%. Lu et al. (2017) proposed a deep CNNs rot on stems
7 Rice white Strip Centre: Ashen; Edge: Leaf tip 32
based rice disease identification method to identify 10 varieties of rice
tip Brown
diseases; they experimented on 500 natural rice plant images and ach­ 8 Rice Long strip Brown to black Rice 72
ieved an accuracy of 95.48%. Rahman et al. (2020) introduced a sheath rot on sheaths sheaths
two-stage small CNN architecture to identify rice diseases and pests 9 Rice stripe The strip Yellow and white Rice leaf 48
comprised of 1426 images, and they reached the desired recognition blight parallel with
vein
accuracy of 93.30%. By using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) 10 Rice Block or Gray-green lesions; Leaf, 86
for data augmentation, Gandhi et al. (2018) trained the Inception V3 sheath strip later turn brown sheath,
and MobileNet models to identify crop diseases; they respectively ach­ blight stem
ieved the accuracies of 88.6% and 92% on the PlantVillage dataset. 11 Bacterial Block or Brown or russet Rice leaf 192
leaf streak long strip on
Though many useful findings have been reported in the literature, the
lesion areas
limited diversity of image database has been used for research. These 12 Rice Circular or Gray spot with a Rice leaf 202
datasets mainly contain images taken in laboratory environments rather brown oval brown brown halo
than real-life agriculture fields. In practice, photographs taken should spot spots
cover a broad range of conditions so that it includes a wide variety of
symptom features related to plant diseases (Barbedo, 2018). Addition­
ally, plant diseases may happen in any part of the plants, such as the leaf,
lighting intensities. Where Fujian Institute of Subtropical Botany played
stem, grain, and so on. In spite of the limitations, all previous research
a great helping role. All these images have been labelled the categories
has strongly confirmed the efficacy of CNN models in the identification
based on the domain experts’ knowledge and saved as the JPG format.
of plant diseases. In this paper, we study the transfer learning for the
For the subsequent computations, these images are uniformly processed
deep CNNs and modify the network structure to improve the learning
into the RGB model by Photoshop tools and resized to 224 × 224 di­
capability of minute lesion features. We choose MobileNet-V2 as the
mensions to fit the models. The types of rice plant diseases primarily
backbone model. Based on the transfer learning, we transfer the com­
include twelve diseases: rice stackburn, rice leaf smut, rice leaf scald,
mon knowledge of MobileNet-V2, which is pre-trained on ImageNet, and
rice false smut, rice blast, rice stem rot, rice white tip, rice sheath rot,
incorporate the attention module in the pre-trained model to create a
rice stripe blight, rice sheath blight, bacterial leaf blight, and rice brown
new network namely Mobile-Atten for the identification of rice plant
spot.
diseases. We also optimize the loss function and perform the model
Among them, rice stackburn mainly affects the leaves of rice plants,
training by twice transfer learning. The experimental findings show the
and the lesions are oval to circular spots, 3–10 mm in diameter; young
feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed procedure, and it success­
lesions are tan, later become grey to white with a narrow dark-brown
fully accomplishes the classification of rice plant diseases.
border. For leaf smut, the small black linear lesions on the leaf blade
The rest of this writing is organized with the following hierarchy.
may have dark gold or light brown halos; as the plant approaches
Section 2 summarizes the dataset of images collected, as well as an
maturity, the leaf tips dry out and turn gray. Leaf scald causes the
overall process introduction. Then, the methodology to accomplish the
scalded appearance on leaves, and sometimes lesions are tan blotches at
task of rice disease identification is mainly discussed in this section
leaf edges with yellow or golden borders. Rice false smut causes chalk­
along with related work and the proposed approach. Later in Section 3,
iness of grains which leads to a reduction in grain weight, and plants
experiments are conducted to investigate the performance of the pro­
infected with false smut have individual rice grain transformed into a
posed approach, and the experimental results are evaluated through
mass of spore balls; these spore balls are initially orange, and then turn
comparative analysis. Finally, Section 4 concludes the paper and pro­
into greenish-black when mature. Rice blast can affect any part of a rice
vides future work.
plant: leaves, collars, necks, panicles, and seeds; however, the most
common and diagnostic symptom, diamond-shaped lesions, occur on the
2. Materials and methods
leaves; the lesions appear as small bluish-green flecks, which enlarge
under moist weather to grey center and dark brown margin. For the
2.1. Image dataset
disease of rice stem rot, the small black lesions are formed on the outer
leaf sheath and they enlarge and reach the inner leaf sheath too. Rice
In the experiments, we have obtained 1100 samples of rice plant
white tip reveals the symptom that the leaf tip turns white with a yellow
diseases from various sources. Approximately 660 images were acquired
area between healthy and diseased tissue. Rice sheath rot reduces grain
from different online sources, and the other 440 were collected from
yield by retarding or aborting panicle emergence, and producing
real-life agricultural fields with heterogeneous backdrops and variable

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J. Chen et al. Expert Systems With Applications 169 (2021) 114514

Fig. 1. Sample images of rice plant diseases.

unfilled seeds and sterile panicles; the lesion starts at the uppermost leaf
sheath enclosing the young panicles, and it appears oblong or as the
irregular spot with dark reddish, brown margins, and gray center or
brownish-gray throughout. Rice stripe blight can cause high yield losses
when severe epidemics occur; it presents chlorotic to yellowish-white
stripes, mottling, and necrotic streaks on the leaves. Bacterial leaf
streak (BLS) causes wilting of seedlings, yellowing and drying of leaves,
and it can be checked by wilting and yellowing of leaves. Rice brown
spot has been historically ignored as one of the most common and most
damaging rice diseases, and it appears as minute spots on the leaf blade
and glumes; the color is gray and the lesion margin is reddish-brown to
dark brown. Table 1 summarizes the key symptom features of diverse
rice diseases and the sample size. The partial sample images are dis­
played in Fig. 1.
2.2. Overall process
The overall processes of our approach for the identification of rice
plant diseases are presented below. Firstly, the rice plant disease images
were collected from real-life agricultural fields and directly downloaded

Fig. 2. The overall flow of rice disease identification.

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J. Chen et al.
Fig. 3. Basic blocks of MobileNet and MobileNet-V2 (Sandler et al., 2018).
from different online sources. The rice disease types of these samples
were known in advance and labelled according to the domain experts’
knowledge. Then, the image pre-processing techniques, including image
resizing, image filtering, and image sharpening, were conducted on the
sample images. The dimensions of the sample images were uniformly
resized to 224 × 224 pixels to fit the model, the image filtering was
implemented to eliminate the noise of digital images, and the image
sharpening was conducted on individual blurred images to make them
clean. Next, in addition to reserving some raw images for verifying the
validity of the model, we utilized the data augmentation scheme to
synthesize new images for balancing and diversifying the sample im­
ages, so as to avoid overfitting problems. Both the enhanced Generative
Adversarial Networks (GAN) (Goodfellow et al., 2014) and traditional
data augmentation methods, such as color jittering, random rotation,
random translation, flipping, and scale transformation, were used to
generate new synthetic images. After that, the augmented sample im­
ages were input to the proposed Mobile-Atten network, which fused the
merits of the lightweight MobileNet-V2 and the attention mechanism of
channel and location, to train the model. In particular, twice transfer
learning (TL) was performed in the model training, and the yielded
optimum model was used to identify the rice disease types for the new
unseen images. By this means, the final identification results of rice
disease images are obtained and can also be used to update the expert
sample library. That is, the correctly identified plant disease images can
be collected and saved as sample images after confirmation for the next
model training, which forms a closed-loop for the overall processes.
Also, with the increase of training sample data, the model accuracy is
higher as well. Fig. 2 depicts the flowchart of rice disease identification,
and the detailed descriptions of these phases are illustrated in subse­
quent sections.
2.3. Related work
2.3.1. Attention mechanism
The attention mechanism is an effective method for feature extrac­
tion (Wang et al., 2017; Woo et al., 2018; Anderson et al., 2018). Many
studies have been done on attention mechanism and achieved impres­
sive performance. In general, the attention mechanism can be divided
into channel attention and spatial attention (Nan & Xi, 2019). Channel
attention mechanism (CAM) is prominent when seeking the desired
target in multiple feature maps, while spatial (location) attention
mechanism (SAM) is well in probing the location of the target in the
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Expert Systems With Applications 169 (2021) 114514
feature map. Suppose that an intermediate feature map Fs ∈ RC×H×W is
input to the attention module, Fs contains the lower stage feature map FL
and higher stage feature map FH. Here the lower stage feature map FL
represents the local features of images such as the edges, lines, and
corners, etc., and the higher stage feature map FH is the composition of
low stage features. Thus, the CAM will infer a 1D channel attention map
MC ∈ RC×1×1 and SAM will generate a 2D spatial attention map Ms ∈
R1×H×W. The overall processes of attention mechanism can be summa­
rized as follows:
Fs = FH + FL
(1)
′
Fs = MC (Fs ) ⊗ Fs
′ ′
Fs′′ = MS (Fs ) ⊗ Fs
where ⊗ denotes the dot product of elements. Among them, the CAM
and SAM both adopt the average pooling and maximum pooling to
calculate the input feature x , and the CAM adds these two pooling re­
sults to get the final feature, as shown in Eq. (2).
MC (x) = δ(MLP(avgpool(x)) + MLP(maxpool(x))) (2)
where x ∈ Rc×w×h, δ is sigmoid activation function, and MLP is a
multilayer perceptron. The SAM concatenates the final feature obtained
from channel attention and conducts the convolution by a standard
convolution layer, producing the spatial attention map. It is computed
by:
MS (x) = δ(f 7×7 ([avgpool(x); maxpool(x)])) (3)
where f 7×7 denotes a convolution operation with the kernel size of 7 ×
7. In practice, the channel-first order performs better than the spatial-
first order (Woo et al., 2018). Therefore, first the channel attention
mechanism is implemented on features, and then the spatial attention
module is calculated, which is adopted in our approach.
2.3.2. MobileNet-v2
Mobile-nets are formed on the basis of streamlined structures that
use depth-wise separable convolutions to build lightweight CNNs (Shen
et al., 2019). The MobileNet is shaped up based on depthwise separable
convolution (DWSC) (Howard et al., 2017; Sifre & Stéphane, 2014),
which splits a standard convolution into two steps: a depth-wise
convolution (DWC) and a 1 × 1 convolution called point-wise convo­
lution (PWC). In DWC, each channel conducts the convolutional oper­
ation with one filter for the input map, and the PWC uses the results of
J. Chen et al. Expert Systems With Applications 169 (2021) 114514

Fig. 4. The schematic diagram of transfer learning.

DWC to perform a 1 × 1 convolution kernel operation, as calculated in dimensional features (excluding ReLU), and then 1 × 1 convolution is
Eqs. (4,5) respectively. utilized for dimension reduction of the features. In addition, MobileNet-
V2 applies a linear bottleneck rather than ReLU to avoid damage to
H ∑
∑ L
DWC(Wd , y)(i,j) = Wd(h,l) ⊙ y(i+h,j+l) (4) features. Compared with the other start-of-the-art methods, MobileNet-
h=0 l=0 V2 has a smaller model size and fewer parameters. It is the most optimal
deep learning architecture till date (Shen et al., 2019; Sandler et al.,
∑
K
2018), Therefore, in this work, we chose MobileNet-V2 as the backbone
PWC(Wp , y)(i,j) = Wk × y(i,j,k) (5)
k=0
network to identify rice plant diseases. Fig. 3 shows the structural
changes from MobileNetV1 to MobileNetV2.
where L and H represent the width and height of the image respectively,
(i, j) index position of the image, ʘ denotes element-wise multiplication, 2.3.3. Transfer learning
W is the weights of filters, K is the number of channels, and y denotes the Transfer learning is a machine learning technique by which the
input image. Accordingly, the DWSC is conducted by the following knowledge learned from a rich-label source domain is used to train in
procedure, as expressed in Eq. (6). another poor-label target domain (Pan & Yang, 2009). The principles of
transfer learning are briefly described below. A domain D consists of two
DWSC(Wp , Wd , y)(i,j) = PWC(i,j) (Wp , DWC(i,j) (Wd , y)) (6)
parts: a feature space χ and a marginal probability distribution P(X),
MobileNet-V2 (Sandler et al., 2018) proposes the concept of the where X = {x1 , ⋯, xn } ∈ χ . Source domain DS and target domain DT are
inverted residual block and linear bottleneck structures based on two basic concepts in transfer learning. Domain with a large amount of
MobileNet-V1. It focuses on solving the problem that MobileNet-V1 is labelled data and knowledge is the source domain, which is used to train
easy to vanishing the training process, and has a certain improvement the basic model. The target domain is the unlabelled domain waiting for
over MobileNet-V1. In the workflow of the inverse residual block, a 1 × knowledge transfer. A task Tis comprised of two parts: a label space Y
1 convolution kernel is employed to increase the dimension of low- and an objective predictive function f(∙). Accordingly, TS is the task of
the source domain, and TT is the task of the target domain. Based on the

Fig. 5. The schematic diagram of the proposed Mobile-Atten architecture.

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J. Chen et al. Expert Systems With Applications 169 (2021) 114514

definitions above, a domain is a pair D = {χ ,P(X)}, and a task is defined
as a pair T = {Y , P(Y|X)}. Transfer learning plays a vital role in deep
CNNs because the deep learning-based CNN algorithms need a large
amount of labelled data to train models, while collecting massive
labelled data in a field is undoubtedly a challenging task. Therefore,
transfer learning has naturally become the preferred scheme and is
increasingly used in practical applications, e.g. the solutions of using a
pre-trained network from ImageNet (Russakovsky et al., 2015), where
only the parameters of newly extended layers are inferred from scratch
while the bottom convolution layers are frozen. Fig. 4 depicts a typical
schematic diagram of transfer learning.
2.4. Proposed approach
2.4.1. Mobile-Atten network
As mentioned earlier, Mobile-nets is a class of lightweight convolu­
tional neural networks based on depthwise separable convolution and
has shown outstanding capability in processing both large scale and
small scale problems. Among them, MobileNet-V2 is one of the most
optimal networks with a small volume and few parameters. More than
that, the attention mechanism can make good use of both the spatial
attention and channel-wise attention to learn the importance of spatial
points and inter-channel relationship for the input features, thereby
improving the accuracy of the models. Thus, inspired by the perfor­
mance, the MobileNet-V2 paired with the attention mechanism was
selected in our approach. Using the method of transfer learning, we
transferred the common knowledge of MobileNet-V2 pre-trained from
ImageNet and added the attention module in the pre-trained model to
create a new network, which we termed the Mobile-Atten, for identi­
fying the crop disease types. To enhance the learning ability of minute
lesion features, we modified the network structure of conventional
MobileNet-V2 and loaded the pre-trained weights from ImageNet (https
the newly formed network namely Mobile-Atten was used to identify the
rice plant diseases. Note that the parameters of auxiliary convolution
layers are initialized by following (He et al., 2015), and the channel first
and then the spatial order is applied in the attention module. Fig. 5
depicts the network structure and relevant parameters are presented in
Table 2.
2.4.2. Loss function
As is well known, the Cross-Entropy Loss function is the most widely
used in deep CNNs, and it is defined in Eq. (7).
∑
C
L= − yc log(pc ) (7)
c=1
where C denotes the number of classes, yc is the indicator variable (yc =
0 or 1; if class c is the same as the category of the sample, yc = 1;
otherwise, yc = 0.), and pc is the predicted probability that the observed
sample belongs to class c. On this basis, Lin et al. (2017) proposed a
Focal Loss function (see Eq. (8)), because the prediction loss weights of
the cross-entropy function were the same for positive and negative
samples.
L(pc ) = − αc (1 − pc )γ log(pc ) (8)
where pc denotes the predicted probability, ac is the weighting factor of
Focal Loss function when the corresponding category is 1, and γ is a
modulating factor (hyperparameter). Note that the Focal Loss function is
primarily used for binary classification problems in target detection. The
identification of crop diseases is a multi-classification problem, and thus
the classical Focal Loss function is enhanced and used to replace the
original Cross-Entropy loss function in our model, as computed in Eqs.
(9–11).
∑
C

://keras.io/api/applications/). The classification layer at the tail of the Lmult = − αc (1 − pc )γ yc log(pc ) (9)
MobileNet-V2 was abandoned and we added the attention module
c=1

behind the pre-trained model, which was followed by an additional αc = count(xi ∈ c)/count(xi ) (10)
convolutional layer of 1280 × 1 × 1 for high-dimensional feature
extraction. Then, one BatchNormalization layer was added to make the {
1, c = acutal class
network converge faster and more stable, and the shortcut connection yc = (11)
0, c ∕
= acutal class
approach was particularly utilized in the attention module to avoid in­
formation loss and increase the expressive ability of the model. Next, the where C is the number of classes, and xi denotes the sample.
completely linked layer was replaced by a global pooling layer, and a
new completely linked Softmax layer with a practical number of cate­
gories was added as the new classification layer of the network. Thus,

Table 2
The main parameters of the network.
Module (type) Input shape Expansion factor output channel no. Repeated times Stride

Input 224 × 224 × 3 – 3 1 –

Conv2d 224 × 224 × 3 – 32 1 2
Boottleneck 112 × 112 × 32 1 16 1 1
Boottleneck 112 × 112 × 16 6 24 2 2
Boottleneck 56 × 56 × 24 6 32 3 2
Boottleneck 28 × 28 × 32 6 64 4 2
Boottleneck 14 × 14 × 64 6 96 3 1
Boottleneck 14 × 14 × 96 6 160 3 2
Boottleneck 7⨯7 × 160 6 320 1 1
Conv2d 1 × 1 7 × 7 × 320 – 1280 1 1
BatchNormalization 7 × 7 × 1280 – 1280 1 1
Conv2d 1 × 1 7 × 7 × 1280 – 1280 2 1
Globalpool 7 × 7 × 1280 – 1280 2 1
Add_1 1 × 1 × 1280 – 1280 1 –
Multiply 7 × 7 × 1280,1 × 1 × 1280 – 1 1 –
Concatenate 7×7×1 – 2 1 –
Conv2d 7×7×2 – 1 1 1
Multiply 7 × 7 × 1280, 7 × 7 × 1 – 1280 1 –
Add_2 7 × 7 × 1280 – 1280 1 –
Globalpool 7 × 7 × 1280 – 1280 1 1
Softmax 1⨯1 × k – k 1 1

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J. Chen et al.
Fig. 6. Sample images of the PlantVillage dataset.
2.4.3. Training strategy
The model training was performed by using twice transfer learning.
In the first phase, only the parameters of newly extended layers were
inferred from scratch while the weights of bottom convolution layers
pre-trained from ImageNet were frozen. The second phase retrained all
the weight parameters using the target dataset by loading the model
trained in the first phase. By doing this, the added auxiliary layers of the
network could be trained first and obtained the weight parameters
learned from the target dataset, and then the whole networks with the
bottom convolution layers pre-trained on ImageNet had initial weights
and were fine-tuned using the target dataset instead of learning from
scratch, thereby improving the performance of the model. Concretely,
the model was trained by applying the following processes.
1. The first step trained the parameters of extended layers and trans­
ferred the common image knowledge learned from ImageNet. Using
the approach of transfer learning, the newly extended layers were
trained on the target dataset and the common image knowledge was
transferred to the Mobile-Atten model by freezing all the weights of
the bottom convolution layers. Where we used the Adam optimizer
(Kingma and Ba, 2014) to update the weights in this phase.
wk = wk− 1 − α* m
√̅̅̅̅̅
v k + ε)
̂ k /( ̂ (12)
Here k denotes the index of classes, w represents the weight pa­
rameters, a is the learning rate, m̂ k is the bias-corrected first moment,
v k is the bias-corrected second moment.
and̂
2. The second phase retrained the model using the target dataset. By
loading the model trained in the first phase, we retrained the
network using the target dataset and the weight parameters of all the
layers were retrained using the new sample images on the target
domain. In this phase, the most used stochastic gradient descent
(SGD) optimizer (Ghazi, Berrin, & Erchan, 2017) was utilized to
update the network weights, as defined in Eq. (13).
wk = wk− 1 − a(∂L(w)/∂w) (13)
where w denotes the weight parameters, k is the index of classes, a is the
learning rate, and L(⋅) represents the loss function.
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Expert Systems With Applications 169 (2021) 114514
3. Experimental results and analysis
In our experiments, except for some image pre-processing work
performed by the Photoshop tool, the main algorithms such as data
augmentation and CNNs were conducted using Anaconda3 (Python 3.6),
Keras-GPU library, and OpenCV-python3 library, etc. The training and
testing of CNNs were accelerated by GPU, and the experimental hard­
ware configuration included Intel® Xeon(R) E5-2620 CPU (2.10 GHz),
64-GB memory, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 (CUDA 10.2) graphics
card, which was used for the model training and testing.
3.1. Experiments on a public dataset
PlantVillage repository (www.plantvillage.org) is an international
general dataset for the machine learning algorithm test of plant disease
identification (Hughes & Salathé, 2015). To investigate the performance
of the proposed procedure, we perform a series of experiments on this
general dataset, which is comprised of different types of plants and their
diseases. There are a total of 54,306 plant leaf images in the PlantVillage
dataset, including 12 healthy plants and 26 disease types for 14 crop
species. These photographs are originally colored images of plant leaves
taken in simple background conditions and uniform illumination in­
tensities. The number of sample images in each category is not consis­
tent, and the dimensions of all the images are uniformly fixed at 256 ×
256 pixels. Note that some of the different images are the same plant leaf
photographed from diverse directions. In the experiments, we down­
loaded all the 38 varieties of plant leaf images, and the one-hot encoding
of the classification variable was first done for model training. Fig. 6
displays the partial sample images of the PlantVillage dataset.
Based on the procedure proposed in Section 2.4, we perform the
model training and validation on the plant disease dataset. The training
set and test set are divided according to the ratio of 8:2. Particularly, to
know how the proposed procedure will perform on new unseen data, a
certain number of raw images are reserved to validate the effectiveness
of the model (20% of the PlantVillage dataset, 10,861 images). Note that
the “unseen” data in this context denotes the unknown plant images that
have never been used by the CNN models during the training and
testing. Furthermore, to compare the proposed approach with other
state-of-the-art methods, we chose five influential small CNNs, including
MobileNet, MobileNet-V2, NASNetMobile (Zoph et al., 2018),
J. Chen et al. Expert Systems With Applications 169 (2021) 114514

Table 3
The training accuracy and loss of different methods on the public dataset.
Pre-trained models 10 epochs 30 epochs

Training accuracies % Test accuracies % Training losses Training accuracies % Test accuracies % Training losses Test losses

MobileNet-V1 98.75 97.89 0.0927 99.47 98.09 0.0567 0.1242

MobileNet-V2 98.19 94.12 0.1189 99.20 96.58 0.0710 0.1647
NASNetMobile 98.50 97.37 1.0787 99.66 98.15 0.5961 1.2304
EfficientNet-B0 96.86 97.56 2.4432 98.70 98.76 1.1805 1.0746
DenseNet-121 99.81 98.93 0.1243 99.98 99.08 0.0333 0.4003
MobileNetv2_2stage 99.66 98.14 1.4216 99.89 98.68 1.2836 1.7612
MobileAtten_alpha 97.44 96.45 0.8715 98.93 96.80 0.8032 0.8041
Proposed procedure 99.39 98.26 1.0612 99.90 98.84 0.8495 1.2855

Fig. 7. ROC curve and confusion matrix of plant disease identification.

EfficientNet-B0 (Tan & Le, 2019), and DenseNet121 (Huang et al, 2017),
as the baseline algorithms to perform the comparative analyses. Using
the approach of transfer learning, the top layers of all the models were
abandoned and a new fully-connected Softmax layer with the practical
number of categories was used as the classification layer. In addition, to
especially study the rationality and effectiveness of the attention module
used in the networks, we adopted the approach of using the pre-trained
MobileNet-V2 model by twice transfer learning, which we termed the
MobileNetv2_2stage, to identify the plant disease images. In the same
way, we have also used the approach of once training the Mobile-Atten
network instead of twice transfer learning solution, which we call this
approach as MobileAtten_alpha, to study the improvement of the overall
network performance by the proposed procedure. By doing this, these
CNN models were constructed and the parameters were initialized
through loading the pre-trained weights from ImageNet. A batch size of
64 was used to train the networks, with 30 epochs and a learning rate of
lr = 10-4. Therefore, the diverse CNN models were trained and multiple
experiments were conducted on the public dataset. Table 3 displays the
training and test results.
From Table 3, it can be visualized that the proposed procedure
achieves an increased efficacy and has delivered comparable results
relative to other state-of-the-art methods. After training for 30 epochs,
the proposed procedure reached a test accuracy of 98.84% on the public
dataset. This is the top performance of all the algorithms except for the
DenseNet-121, which is a deep CNNs with a relatively large volume and
consumes more computational resources. In contrast, the proposed
Mobile-Atten approach is memory efficient, and the model volume is
only about 1/3 of that of DenseNet-121. It delivered a comparable effect
and relatively high accuracy in the experiments, even though the
optimum classifier is employed. The key explanation for this is that the
Mobile-Atten model integrates the merits of both MobileNet-V2 and
attention module of channel and location, which increases the capability
of learning minute lesion features. Moreover, transfer learning is per­
formed twice for model training, which makes the optimum weight
parameters be obtained for the newly generated network. By contrast,
the other methods are the individual networks; although the weights are
initialized with pre-trained networks instead of inferring from scratch
and the fine-tuning approach is applied too, the optimum results are not
achieved for these models. Therefore, using the model trained by the
proposed procedure, the new unseen images are chosen to perform the
identification of plant disease types. Referring to Hari et al. (2019) work,
the partial plant leaf images such as apple, grape, and potato, are
selected to test, and the corresponding ROC (receiver operating char­
acteristic) curve and confusion matrices of identified results are depicted
in Fig. 7.
Considering the statistics of accurate detections (true positives),
misdetections (false negatives), true negatives, and false positives, we
performed an exhaustive analysis of the results output from different
CNN models. Various metrics like Accuracy, Sensitivity (Recall), Speci­
ficity, Precision, and F1-Score, were used to measure the performance of
plant disease identification, as written in Eqs. (14–18).
TP + TN
Accuracy = (14)
TP + TN + FP + FN
TP
Sensitivity = (15)
TP + FN

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J. Chen et al. Expert Systems With Applications 169 (2021) 114514

Table 4
The identification results of different plant disease types.
No. Category names Identified samples Correct samples Accuracy (%) Sensitivity (%) Specificity (%) Precision (%) F1-Score (%)

1 Apple Healthy 129 127 99.71 98.44 99.89 99.21 98.83

2 Apple Scab 126 123 99.52 97.61 99.78 98.40 98.00
3 Maize Healthy 70 70 99.80 100.00 99.79 97.22 98.59
4 Maize Cercospora 40 38 99.80 95.00 100.00 100.00 97.43
5 Grape Healthy 84 83 99.71 98.80 99.79 97.64 98.22
6 Grape Black Rot 236 234 99.80 99.15 100.00 100.00 99.57
7 Tomato Healthy 118 116 99.52 98.30 99.67 97.47 97.89
8 Tomato Blight 112 109 99.42 97.32 99.67 97.32 97.32
9 Potato Healthy 30 28 99.71 93.33 99.90 96.55 94.91
10 Potato Blight 100 100 99.71 100.00 99.68 98.52 99.68
− Average − − 99.67 98.37 99.81 98.37 99.81

TN 3.2. Experiments on our local dataset

Specificity =
TN + FP
Precision =
TP
TP + FP
2TP
F1 − Score =
2TP + FN + FP
where true positive (TP) denotes the positive data label which is accu­
rately identified; false positive (FP) is a negative data label which is
mistakenly identified; true negative (TN) is a negative data label that is
identified correctly; false negative (FN) is positive data label which is
identified incorrectly. Table 4 presents the actual analysis of the results
which were assessed in the form of different metrics.
Fig. 7(a) reveals ideal operating characteristics in this figure and the
curves of each category are almost close to the top left corner, which
indicates the validity of the proposed procedure. Also, it can be
demonstrated by the confusion matrix of identified results, as shown in
Fig. 7(b). Most of the sample images in each category are successfully
identified by the proposed procedure, and the average Accuracy reached
99.67%, which shows that the proposed Mobile-Atten approach has a
strong capability to identify various plant diseases in simple background
conditions. Particularly, in addition to identifying whether the plant is
healthy or diseased, the proposed approach also discriminates the spe­
cific plant disease types, and the average Sensitivity (Recall) and F1-Score
achieve 99.08% and 99.78% separately, as given in Table 4.
In addition, we also summarize the experimental results of some
recent studies conducted on the PlantVillage dataset for the comparative
analysis, as shown in Table 5. The highest accuracy, number of classes,
used models, and corresponding references, etc. are all listed in the
table. Most of the literature does not use all the data of the PlantVillage,
so the number of classifications is less than 38 categories of this dataset.
In our experiment, a total of 38 categories, including 12 healthy plants
and 26 disease types, are all used to train the model. The proposed
procedure exhibited a comparable result relative to other state-of-the-art
methods, even under multiple classification conditions.
(16)
Similar to Section 3.1, the proposed procedure is tested on our
(17) collected rice disease image dataset, which is captured from real-life
agricultural fields with complicated background conditions and un­
even illumination intensity, such as the surroundings of the field, soils of
(18) different colors, and capturing in overcast or sunny weather, etc. The
dataset is divided into a training set and a test set with a ratio of 8:2
except that a certain number of original images are retained to verify the
validity of the model. In particular, as mentioned previously, we utilized
the data augmentation scheme to enrich the dataset due to the unbal­
anced sample size distributions of various categories, and the training
sample images were guaranteed to be at least 200 images in each cate­
gory. The traditional data augmentation techniques, such as color jit­
tering, random rotation, random translation, flipping, and scale
transformation, were utilized to synthesize new images. The parameters
of the traditional augmentation approach used in the experiments were:
color jittering was changing the saturation, brightness, and contrast of
color with a random adjustment factor in the interval of (0, 3.1), the
rotation operation was conducted with an arbitrary angle in the range of
[0,360◦ ], the image translation was in the range of ±20%, and the scale
was changed from 0.8 to 1.2. Although the traditional data augmenta­
tion approach can synthesize new images, they may also destroy the
linear relationship of the raw images and the diversity as well as vari­
ability of the newly generated images are limited too. Therefore, on this
basis, we adopted the data augmentation scheme that the traditional
data augmentation approaches paired with the enhanced DCGAN algo­
rithm were used together. To the best of our knowledge, most of the
successful CNNs adopts high-level pixel images as the input, such as 224
× 224 pixels, to enhance the performance of the models. However, the
classical DCGAN (Radford et al., 2015) is designed to synthesize the low-
level 64 × 64 pixel images, for the higher resolution of training is not
stable as one network becomes more powerful than the other. Because of
this, we modified the classical DCGAN and enlarged the input image
resolution to fit the influential CNN models. A styled convolutional
block of 128 × 64 × 3 followed by a 32 × 3 convolutional block was
added in the generator module, and at the same time, the input shape

Table 5
Comparing with the latest literature on the public PlantVillage dataset.
References CNN models No. of classes No. of training samples No. of test sample Accuracies

Mohanty et al. (2016) GoogLeNet 38 43,444 1000 99.35%

Durmuş et al. (2017) AlexNet 10 14,543 3635 95.65%
Brahimi et al. (2017) GoogLeNet 9 11,862 2965 99.18%
Amara et al. (2017) LeNet 3 2960 740 98.61%
Sardogan et al. (2018) CNN with LVQ 5 400 100 86.00%
Tm et al., 2018 LeNet 10 13,360 4800 94.95%
Too et al. (2019) DenseNets 38 34,727 1,0876 99.75%
Arsenovic et al. (2019) PlantDiseaseNet 18 14,667 3666 93.67%
Elhassouny et al. (2019) Smart CNN 10 7176 Some test samples 90.30%
Karthik et al. (2020) Attention-based residual CNN 4 76,799 19,199 98.00%
Proposed approach Mobile-Atten 38 34,755 1045 99.67%

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J. Chen et al. Expert Systems With Applications 169 (2021) 114514

Fig. 8. The augmented samples by the traditional geometric transformation.

Fig. 9. The synthetic sample images by enhanced DCGAN.

Table 6
The training accuracy and loss of different methods on the local rice image dataset.
Pre-trained models 10 epochs 30 epochs

Training accuracies % Test accuracies % Training losses Training accuracies % Test accuracies % Training losses Test losses

MobileNet-V1 85.20 81.25 0.9516 89.97 83.75 0.5272 0.9048

MobileNet-V2 94.98 81.25 0.2840 97.78 84.38 0.1053 0.8438
NASNetMobile 91.37 81.02 6.6870 99.10 82.48 1.1458 17.0272
EfficientNet-B0 77.55 79.56 19.3843 91.28 91.24 7.4878 9.0473
DenseNet-121 98.36 90.51 1.6010 99.75 91.25 0.3522 8.2286
MobileNetv2_2stage 98.03 83.94 2.1117 99.84 87.59 0.4204 8.1748
MobileAtten_alpha 90.48 83.75 0.7528 90.21 85.40 0.5347 0.7680
Proposed procedure 98.52 89.78 1.0199 99.75 90.51 0.4360 10.2696

was set 224 × 224 × 3 and the corresponding 32 × 3 convolutional block
followed by a 64 × 128 × 3 convolutional block was used in the
discriminator module. In this manner, the assigned input dimension of
64 × 64 pixels was substituted for a 224 × 224 pixel input dimension.
The hyperparameters were set as follows: an epoch of 5 × 105, a batch-
size of 16, a learning rate of 1 × 10-4, and the optimizer of Adam.
Therefore, by doing this, we augment the sample images, and the partial
samples synthesized by the traditional approaches and the enhanced
DCGAN method are respectively displayed in Figs. 8 and 9.
Subsequently, using the method proposed in Section 2.4, we per­
formed the model training and validation on the rice image dataset, and
all the augmented images were uniformly resized to the fixed-dimension
of 224 × 224 pixels to fit the model. Likewise, the five most-used CNNs
such as MobileNet, MobileNet-V2, NASNetMobile, EfficientNet-B0, and
DenseNet121, were selected to compare models. In the meantime, the
approaches of MobileNetv2_2stage and MobileAtten_alpha are also
added in the comparative experiments. Applying the transfer learning,
these models are created and loaded with pre-trained weights from
ImageNet, and the top layers are truncated by defining a new fully-
connected Softmax layer with the practical number of classifications.
Thus, the models of diverse CNNs are trained and multiple experiments
are conducted on our local dataset. Table 6 shows the training accuracy

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J. Chen et al. Expert Systems With Applications 169 (2021) 114514

Fig. 10. ROC curve and confusion matrix of rice disease identification.

Table 7
The identified results of different rice disease classes.
ID Rice disease types Identifiedsamples Correct samples Accuracy(%) Sensitivity(%) Specificity(%) Precision(%) F1-Score(%)

1 Rice stackburn 14 13 98.49 92.85 98.80 81.25 86.67

2 Rice leaf smut 19 18 99.24 94.73 99.59 94.73 94.73
3 Rice leaf scald 19 15 99.09 78.94 100.00 100.00 88.23
4 Rice false smut 23 21 99.24 91.30 100.00 100.00 95.45
5 Rice blast 17 16 96.22 94.11 96.37 64.00 76.19
6 Rice stem rot 25 24 99.24 96.00 99.58 96.00 96.00
7 Rice white tip 16 13 98.49 81.25 99.59 92.85 86.67
8 Rice sheath rot 36 35 97.73 97.22 97.81 87.50 92.11
9 Rice stripe blight 23 20 98.49 86.95 99.58 95.23 90.91
10 Rice sheath blight 43 41 98.86 95.34 99.54 97.61 96.47
11 Bacterial leaf streak 15 13 98.86 86.67 99.60 92.85 89.65
12 Rice brown spot 15 11 97.65 73.33 99.17 84.61 78.57
− Average − − 98.48 90.56 99.17 90.56 90.56

and loss of different approaches.
It can be observed from Table 6 that the proposed procedure has
gained a significant increase in efficacy relative to other state-of-the-art
CNNs. When trained for 10 epochs and 30 epochs, the training accu­
racies of the proposed procedure have reached 98.52% and 99.75%
respectively. In particular, after 30 epoch training, the test accuracy
achieves 90.51%, which is the top performance of all the algorithms
except for the EfficientNet-B0 and DenseNet-121. However, the training
log-loss of EfficientNet-B0 is too big and it even reaches 19.3843 when
training in 10 epochs. For DenseNet-121, as discussed earlier, its volume
is around 3 times that of our method and consumes more computational
resources. By contrast, the proposed procedure is memory efficient and
performs well with relatively high accuracy and low log-loss. Thus,
using the model trained by the proposed procedure, the new unseen
images are selected for the identification of rice plant diseases. Fig. 10
depicts the identification results and an exhaustive indicator analysis is
displayed in Table 7.
As can be visualized in Fig. 10(a), the ROC curve presents a higher
TPR (true-positive rates) while a lower FPR (false-positive rate) for most
identified classes, which is also reflected in the confusion matrix of
Fig. 10(b). The proposed procedure has successfully identified most of
the test samples in different rice disease types. For example, 13 “Rice
stackburn” samples are accurately identified except for 1 false detection,
and the identification accuracy is 98.49%. The correct number is 18 for
the identification of “Rice leaf smut” rice disease in 38 samples. Also, 15
images are accurately identified by the proposed procedure in 19
samples, and the identification accuracy reaches 99.09%. Thus, a total of
240 samples are accurately identified in 265 unseen images, and the
average Accuracy, Sensitivity, and Specificity respectively achieve
98.48%, 90.56%, and 99.17%, as shown in Table 7. On the other hand,
there are also some misidentifications such as 3 samples in the disease
types of “Rice white tip”, which is caused by different plant diseases such
as “ rice white tip ” and “ rice leaf burn ” occurring in the same plant.
Besides, the heterogeneous background conditions and irregular light­
ing strengths may also affect the identification results. Fig. 11 displays
the partial identified sample images.
As seen in Fig. 11, the top images are the original sample images, the
middle images are the positioning images presented by the visualization
technique of classification activation map, and the bottom images are
the results identified by the proposed procedure. From Fig. 11, we can
see that the identified categories of most samples are consistent with the
actual categories of them and most of the rice plant diseases have been
accurately identified by the proposed procedure except for some indi­
vidual samples. Such as Fig. 11(a), the actual disease type of this sample
is “Rice stackburn”, which is correctly identified by the proposed pro­
cedure with the probability of 0.74. Similarly, Fig. 11(b, d) are all
accurately identified and the identification probabilities are respectively
greater than 0.99 and 0.84. Conversely, there are individual mis­
identified samples due to serious clutter backgrounds and uneven
lighting conditions, which affect the feature extraction of disease spot
images. Besides, some different rice diseases occurring in the same plant
may also affect the classification results, as shown in Fig. 11(c). In spite

11
J. Chen et al.
Fig. 11. The identified samples of different rice diseases.
of individual misidentifications, most of the rice plant diseases are
accurately identified by the proposed procedure. The high accuracy has
been achieved on the unseen images for a set of experiments, which
indicates that the Mobile-Atten approach has a significant capability to
identify rice plant diseases. Based on the experimental analysis, it can be
assumed that the proposed procedure is successful in the identification
of rice plant diseases, and can also be extended to other fields such as
computer-aided detection, online defect assessment, etc.
4. Conclusions
Identification and classification of various plant diseases by means of
digital images is very necessary to get the quality of plant products
better. Deep learning techniques, especially CNNs, can effectively and
efficiently identify most of the visual symptoms related to plant diseases
(Barbedo, 2019). In this paper, we proposed a novel network architec­
ture called Mobile-Atten, which had a small model size and relatively
high accuracy, to perform the identification of rice disease types. The
MobileNet-V2 was chosen as the backbone model in our method. Using
transfer learning, we transferred the common knowledge of MobileNet-
V2 pre-trained from ImageNet and added the attention module in the
pre-trained model to create a new network for identifying the types of
rice plant diseases. Also, the loss function was optimized and the model
training was performed by twice transfer learning. The experimental
findings demonstrate the feasibility and validity of the proposed pro­
cedure, and it is successfully accomplished to identify diverse plant
diseases on both the public dataset and the local dataset. In future
development, we intend to deploy it on mobile devices to monitor and
identify the wide range of rice plant diseases automatically. Meanwhile,
we plan to apply it on more real-world applications.
12
Expert Systems With Applications 169 (2021) 114514
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Junde Chen: Methodology, Software, Writing - original draft. Defu
Zhang: Supervision. Adnan Zeb: . Yaser A. Nanehkaran: Data
curation.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of
China under grant No. 61672439 and the Fundamental Research Funds
for the Central Universities No. 20720181004. The authors also would
like to thank the editors and all the anonymous reviewers for their
constructive advice.
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