Improved EfficientNet for corn disease identification

INTRODUCTION: Corn is one of the world's essential crops, and the presence of corn diseases significantly affects both the yield and quality of corn. Accurate identification of corn diseases in real time is crucial to increasing crop yield and improving farmers' income. However, in real-world environments, the complexity of the background, irregularity of the disease region, large intraclass variation, and small interclass variation make it difficult for most convolutional neural network models to achieve disease recognition under such conditions. Additionally, the low accuracy of existing lightweight models forces farmers to compromise between accuracy and real-time. METHODS: To address these challenges, we propose FCA-EfficientNet. Building upon EfficientNet, the fully-convolution-based coordinate attention module allows the network to acquire spatial information through convolutional structures. This enhances the network's ability to focus on disease regions while mitigating interference from complex backgrounds. Furthermore, the adaptive fusion module is employed to fuse image information from different scales, reducing interference from the background in disease recognition. Finally, through multiple experiments, we have determined the network structure that achieves optimal performance. RESULTS: Compared to other widely used deep learning models, this proposed model exhibits outstanding performance in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Furthermore, the model has a parameter count of 3.44M and Flops of 339.74M, which is lower than most lightweight network models. We designed and implemented a corn disease recognition application and deployed the model on an Android device with an average recognition speed of 92.88ms, which meets the user's needs. DISCUSSION: Overall, our model can accurately identify corn diseases in realistic environments, contributing to timely and effective disease prevention and control.