Rice disease recognition is crucial in automated rice disease diagnosis systems. At present, deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is generally considered the state-of-the-art solution in image recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel rice blast recognition method based on CNN. A dataset of 2906 positive samples and 2902 negative samples is established for training and testing the CNN model. In addition, we conduct comparative experiments for qualitative and quantitatively analysis in our evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposed method. The evaluation results show that the high-level features extracted by CNN are more discriminative and effective than traditional hand-crafted features including local binary patterns histograms (LBPH) and Haar-WT (Wavelet Transform). Moreover, quantitative evaluation results indicate that CNN with Softmax and CNN with support vector machine (SVM) have similar performances, with higher accuracy, larger area under curve (AUC), and better receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves than both LBPH plus an SVM as the classifier and Haar-WT plus an SVM as the classifier. Therefore, our CNN model is a top performing method for rice blast disease recognition and can be potentially employed in practical applications.