An Improved EfficientNetV2 Model Based on Visual Attention Mechanism: Application to Identification of Cassava Disease

With the characteristic of high recognition rate and strong network robustness, convolutional neural network has now become the most mainstream method in the field of crop disease recognition. Aiming at the problems with insufficient numbers of labeled samples, complex backgrounds of sample images, and difficult extraction of useful feature information, a novel algorithm is proposed in this study based on attention mechanisms and convolutional neural networks for cassava leaf recognition. Specifically, a combined data augmentation strategy for datasets is used to prevent single distribution of image datasets, and then the PDRNet (plant disease recognition network) combining channel attention mechanism and spatial attention mechanism is proposed. The algorithm is designed as follows. Firstly, an attention module embedded in the network layer is deployed to establish remote dependence on each feature layer, strengthen the key feature information, and suppress the interference feature information, such as background noise. Secondly, a stochastic depth learning strategy is formulated to accelerate the training and inference of the network. And finally, a transfer learning method is adopted to load the pretrained weights into the model proposed in this study, with the recognition accuracy of the model enhanced by means of detailed parameter adjustments and dynamic changes in the learning rate. A large number of comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can deliver a recognition accuracy of 99.56% on the cassava disease image dataset, reaching the state-of-the-art level among CNN-based methods in terms of accuracy.