Densenet201 Feature Extraction With Soft Voting Ensemble For Accurate Rice Leaf Disease Classification

Abstract

Rice leaf diseases are one of the major factors contributing to reduced agricultural productivity and economic losses for farmers. Manual disease identification generally requires expert knowledge and is often difficult to perform efficiently in field conditions. Therefore, this study aims to develop a rice leaf disease classification system by combining DenseNet201 as a feature extractor and a Voting Ensemble approach as the classifier. The dataset consisted of 1,470 rice leaf images categorized into five classes: Bacterial Leaf Blight, Brown Spot, Healthy Leaf, Leaf Blast, and Tungro. The dataset was divided using a stratified split strategy into 80% training data, 10% validation data, and 10% testing data. Image augmentation was applied only to the training set, increasing the number of training samples to 7,056 images. DenseNet201 was employed to extract image features into 1,920-dimensional feature vectors, which were subsequently classified using Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Hard Voting, and Soft Voting. Experimental results showed that Logistic Regression achieved an accuracy of 95.24%, while SVM achieved 95.92%. Hard Voting obtained an accuracy of 95.24%, whereas Soft Voting achieved the best performance with an accuracy of 95.92%, precision of 95.75%, recall of 95.70%, F1-score of 95.71%, and ROC-AUC of 99.76%. Furthermore, the best-performing model was deployed in a Streamlit-based application for automatic rice leaf disease identification. The results demonstrate that the combination of DenseNet201 and Soft Voting provides an accurate and effective approach for rice leaf disease classification and has strong potential as an early disease detection tool in agriculture.