The rice plant is one of the most significant crops in the world, and it suffers from various diseases. The traditional methods for rice disease detection are complex and time-consuming, mainly depending on the expert’s experience. The explosive growth in image processing, computer vision, and deep learning techniques provides effective and innovative agriculture solutions for automatically detecting and classifying these diseases. Moreover, more information can be extracted from the input images due to different feature extraction techniques. This paper proposes a new system for detecting and classifying rice plant leaf diseases by fusing different features, including color texture with Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and color features with Color Correlogram (CC). The proposed system consists of five stages. First, input images acquire RGB images of rice plants. Second, image preprocessing applies data augmentation to solve imbalanced problems, and logarithmic transformation enhancement to handle illumination problems has been applied. Third, the features extraction stage is responsible for extracting color features using CC and color texture features using multi-level multi-channel local binary pattern (MCLBP). Fourth, the feature fusion stage provides complementary and discriminative information by concatenating the two types of features. Finally, the rice image classification stage has been applied using a one-against-all support vector machine (SVM). The proposed system has been evaluated on three benchmark datasets with six classes: Blast (BL), Bacterial Leaf Blight (BLB), Brown Spot (BS), Tungro (TU), Sheath Blight (SB), and Leaf Smut (LS) have been used. Rice Leaf Diseases First Dataset, Second Dataset, and Third Dataset achieved maximum accuracy of 99.53%, 99.4%, and 99.14%, respectively, with processing time from $$100(\pm 17)ms$$. Hence, the proposed system has achieved promising results compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.
