Detection of crop health conditions plays an important role in making control strategies of crop disease and insect damage and gaining high-quality production at late growth stages. In this study, hyperspectral reflectance of rice panicles was measured at the visible and near-infrared regions. The panicles were divided into three groups according to health conditions: healthy panicles, empty panicles caused by Nilaparvata lugens Stul, and panicles infected with Ustilaginoidea virens. Low order derivative spectra, namely, the first and second orders, were obtained using different techniques. Principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to obtain the principal component spectra (PCS) of the foregoing derivative and raw spectra to reduce the reflectance spectral dimension. Support vector classification (SVC) was employed to discriminate the healthy, empty, and infected panicles, with the front three PCS as the independent variables. The overall accuracy and kappa coefficient were used to assess the classification accuracy of SVC. The overall accuracies of SVC with PCS derived from the raw, first, and second reflectance spectra for the testing dataset were 96.55%, 99.14%, and 96.55%, and the kappa coefficients were 94.81%, 98.71%, and 94.82%, respectively. Our results demonstrated that it is feasible to use visible and near-infrared spectroscopy to discriminate health conditions of rice panicles. Detection of crop health conditions plays an important role in making control strategies of crop disease and insect damage and gaining high-quality production at late growth stages. In this study, hyperspectral reflectance of rice panicles was measured at the visible and near-infrared regions. The panicles were divided into three groups according to health conditions: healthy panicles, empty panicles caused by Nilaparvata lugens Stul, and panicles infected with Ustilaginoidea virens. component analysis (PCA) was performed to obtain the principal component spectra (PCS) of the previously derivative and raw spectra to reduce the reflectance spectral dimension. Support vector classification (SVC) was employed to discriminate the healthy, empty, and infected panicles, with the front three PCS as the independent variables. The overall accuracy and kappa coefficient were used To assess the classification accuracy of SVC. The overall accuracies of SVC with PCS derived from the raw, first, and second reflectance spectra for the testing dataset were 96.55%, 99.14%, and 96.55%, and the kappa coefficients were 94.81%, 98.71 %, and 94.82%, respectively. Our results of it is feasible to use visible and near-infrared spectroscopy to discriminate health conditions of rice panicles.