Rice Transformer: A Novel Integrated Management System for Controlling Rice Diseases

Rice disease classification is vital during the cultivation of rice crops. However, rice diseases were initially detected by visual examination from agricultural experts. Later the detection process progressed to automation, which involved images. The images captured lead to a lack of supporting information. The traditional approaches are less accurate when used with real time images. To address this limitation, a novel Rice Transformer is proposed in the paper that merges inputs from agricultural sensors and image data captured from the fields simultaneously. The proposed system consists of two branches: the sensor and image branches. Specifically, the attention approach is employed to extract the features from both modalities. Later, the extracted features are sent to the cross-attention module as input in a crisscross fashion, enhancing the ability to identify the features specific to rice diseases. The extracted features are further pooled, merged, and later passed through the Softmax classifier to classify the rice disease precisely. The dataset collected is a customized dataset with 4200 samples collected on a real-time basis from rice farms. The experiments conducted on the dataset represent that the proposed approach outperforms all the other fusion and attention models considered for comparison in this paper. The ablation analysis and performance metrics are measured to determine the effectiveness of the proposed system. The results achieved are quite promising as the proposed Rice transformer model achieves an accuracy of 97.38% for controlling rice disease.