To improve the accuracy and speed of rice processing freshness classification,a classification method based on deep learning was proposed in this paper.Based on VGG-19 architecture,the method introduced SE(squeeze-and-excitation)attention mechanism to follow more closely the features of critical channels and substituted ReLU function with PReLU function for acti-vation purpose.Meanwhile,VGG-19 network was materially modified by replacing its bottom pooling layer with global mixed pooling and deleting the first two fully connected layers.Then,with rice freshness as the research object,the modified VGG-19 network was implemented to classify the rice by its freshness and was proven effective.Simulation results indicate the modified VGG-19 could accurately and quickly classify the rice by freshness.Its average accuracy,precision,recall ratio,and F1 value were 97.81%,97.63%,97.89%,and 97.56%,respectively.It was testified as fast in rice detection,as the test took only 275 s.The method proposed hereby did improve both the accuracy and speed of freshness-based rice processing classification.