LMRNet: a lightweight convolutional neural network for real-time mountain rice leaf disease recognition on edge devices

Introduction Intelligent rice disease prevention and control are crucial components in the development of smart agriculture. In recent years, with the rapid advancement of computer vision technologies, a variety of deep learning-based methods for rice disease identification have been proposed, and some models have already surpassed the diagnostic performance of agricultural technicians. However, the existing models generally suffer from high computational complexity and limited generalization capabilities, rendering them difficult to deploy on edge devices for real-time and accurate disease recognition under offline field conditions. Methods To promote engineering applications of related technologies, this study investigated leaf disease identification methods for mountain-grown rice oriented toward edge intelligence. Based on a self-constructed image dataset of mountain rice leaf diseases and following the design principles of lightweight convolutional neural networks, a novel lightweight mountain rice disease recognition model architecture suitable for edge intelligent devices was constructed. Furthermore, a mountain rice leaf disease recognition application was developed for smartphones on the Android platform. Results Field validation experiments demonstrated that the application achieves an average accuracy of 92.41% across multiple disease categories and an average inference speed of approximately 22.47 frames per second on various smartphone models, indicating high real-time performance and recognition accuracy. Discussion The research outcomes will provide a reliable theoretical foundation and technical support for the intelligent prevention and control of mountain rice diseases.