BackgroundRice disease can significantly reduce yields, so monitoring and identifying the diseases during the growing season is crucial. Some current studies are based on images with simple backgrounds, while realistic scene settings are full of background noise, making this task challenging. Traditional artificial prevention and control methods not only have heavy workload, low efficiency, but are also haphazard, unable to achieve real-time monitoring, which seriously limits the development of modern agriculture. Therefore, using target detection algorithm to identify rice diseases is an important research direction in the agricultural field.MethodsIn this article a total of 7,220 pictures of rice diseases taken in Jinzhai County, Lu’an City, Anhui Province were chosen as the research object, including rice leaf blast, bacterial blight and flax leaf spot. We propose a rice disease identification method based on the improved YOLOV5s, which reduces the computation of the backbone network, reduces the weight file of the model to 3.2MB, which is about 1/4 of the original model, and accelerates the prediction speed by three times.ResultsCompared with other mainstream methods, our method achieves better performance with low computational cost. It solves the problem of slow recognition speed due to the large weight file and calculation amount of model when the model is deployed in mobile terminal.