Feature Mapping for Rice Leaf Defect Detection Based on a Custom Convolutional Architecture.

Rice is a widely consumed food across the world. Whilst the world recovers from COVID-19, food manufacturers are looking to enhance their quality inspection processes for satisfying exportation requirements and providing safety assurance to their clients. Rice cultivation is a significant process, the yield of which can be significantly impacted in an adverse manner due to plant disease. Yet, a large portion of rice cultivation takes place in developing countries with less stringent quality inspection protocols due to various reasons including cost of labor. To address this, we propose the development of lightweight convolutional neural network architecture for the automated detection of rice leaf smut and rice leaf blight. In doing so, this research addresses the issue of data scarcity via a practical variance modeling mechanism (Domain Feature Mapping) and a custom filter development mechanism assisted through a reference protocol for filter suppression.