Abstract
Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) are best in their ability to detect rice diseases but still face challenges in generalizing equally well for all classes of disease in multiclass classification. Detecting rice crop disease like sheath rot is still challenging due to unavailability of dataset and intraclass variations in symptoms. Transfer learning models take more resources for execution due to its deep architecture. To conquer these challenges, VCNet, an optimized, novel and efficient multiclass rice crop disease detection framework is proposed. The study focuses on developing a shallow model with deep feature extraction to bring down the computational load with reduced time for training without compromising on any performance parameters. Further the model goes through two level optimization process where optimal hyperparameters identified through experimentation is given as parameters to genetic algorithm for optimization of VCNet during training. Novel dataset containing field images is generated with the help of plant pathologist to improve model capability to identify diseases. Rigorous empirical comparison and evaluation with state-of-the-art models for each class of disease is done to validate proposed technique. VCNet outperforms the existing transfer learning models with training accuracy 99.72 % and testing accuracy 97.71 %. It also requires fewer parameters and takes minimum training time.•The major contribution of this study is the design of an optimized, efficient and enhanced deep learning technique for multiclass rice crop disease detection embracing with batch normalization, dropout and genetic optimization algorithm to improve generalization power and restrict the overlearning capability for seen and unseen data.•Proposed VCNet, a shallow model with deep feature extraction, employs VGG16 layers for initial extraction fused with custom CNN architecture to correctly detect the challenging classes of diseases like sheath rot in multiclass classification.•The most significant observation is that VCNet accurately predicts the rice disease for each class of diseases under study whereas the existing powerful models largely misclassified for some classes of diseases in multiclass classification.