BACKGROUNDRice leafroller is a serious threat to the production of rice. Monitoring the damage caused by rice leafroller is essential for effective pest management. Owing to limitations in collecting decent quality images and high‐performing identification methods to recognize the damage, studies recommending fast and accurate identification of rice leafroller damage are rare. In this study, we employed an ultra‐lightweight unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to eliminate the influence of the downwash flow field and obtain very high‐resolution images of the damaged areas of the rice leafroller. We used deep learning technology and the segmentation model, Attention U‐Net, to recognize the damaged area by the rice leafroller. Further, a method is presented to count the damaged patches from the segmented area.RESULTSThe result shows that Attention U‐Net achieves high performance, with an F1 score of 0.908. Further analysis indicates that the deep learning model performs better than the traditional image classification method, Random Forest (RF). The traditional method of RF causes a lot of false alarms around the edge of leaves, and is sensitive to the changes in brightness. Validation based on the ground survey indicates that the UAV and deep learning‐based method achieve a reasonable accuracy in identifying damage patches, with a coefficient of determination of 0.879. The spatial distribution of the damage is uneven, and the UAV‐based image collecting method provides a dense and accurate method to recognize the damaged area.CONCLUSIONOverall, this study presents a vision to monitor the damage caused by the rice leafroller with ultra‐light UAV efficiently. It would also contribute to effectively controlling and managing the hazardous rice leafroller. © 2024 Society of Chemical Industry.
