E2ETCA: End-to-end training of CNN and attention ensembles for rice disease diagnosis

Rice is one of the most important crops worldwide. Diseases of the rice plant can drastically reduce crop yield and even lead to complete loss of production. Early diagnosis can reduce the severity and help efforts to establish effective treatment and reduce the usage of pesticides. Traditional machine learning approaches have already been employed for automatic diagnosis. However, they heavily rely on manual preprocessing of images and handcrafted features, which is challenging, time-consuming, and may require domain expertise. Recently, a single end-to-end deep learning (DL)-based approach was employed to diagnose rice diseases. However, it is not highly robust, nor is it generalizable to every dataset. Hence, we propose a novel end-to-end training of convolutional neural network (CNN) and attention (E2ETCA) ensemble framework that fuses the features of two CNN-based state-of-the-art (SOTA) models along with those of an attention-based vision transformer model. These fused features are utilized for diagnosis by the addition of an extra fully connected layer with softmax. The whole procedure is performed end-to-end, which is very important for real-world applications. Additionally, we feed the extracted features into a traditional machine learning approach support vector machine for classification and further analysis. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed E2ETCA framework, we demonstrate it on three publicly available datasets: the Mendeley Rice Leaf Disease Image Samples dataset, the Kaggle Rice Diseases Image dataset, the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute dataset, and a combination of these three datasets. On the basis of various evaluation metrics (accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score), our proposed E2ETCA framework exhibits superior performance to existing SOTA approaches for rice disease diagnosis, which can also be generalizable in similar other domains.