Identification of plant leaf diseases by deep learning based on channel attention and channel pruning

Plant diseases cause significant economic losses and food security in agriculture each year, with the critical path to reducing losses being accurate identification and timely diagnosis of plant diseases. Currently, deep neural networks have been extensively applied in plant disease identification, but such approaches still suffer from low identification accuracy and numerous parameters. Hence, this paper proposes a model combining channel attention and channel pruning called CACPNET, suitable for disease identification of common species. The channel attention mechanism adopts a local cross-channel strategy without dimensionality reduction, which is inserted into a ResNet-18-based model that combines global average pooling with global max pooling to effectively improve the features’ extracting ability of plant leaf diseases. Based on the model’s optimum feature extraction condition, unimportant channels are removed to reduce the model’s parameters and complexity via the L1-norm channel weight and local compression ratio. The accuracy of CACPNET on the public dataset PlantVillage reaches 99.7% and achieves 97.7% on the local peanut leaf disease dataset. Compared with the base ResNet-18 model, the floating point operations (FLOPs) decreased by 30.35%, the parameters by 57.97%, the model size by 57.85%, and the GPU RAM requirements by 8.3%. Additionally, CACPNET outperforms current models considering inference time and throughput, reaching 22.8 ms/frame and 75.5 frames/s, respectively. The results outline that CACPNET is appealing for deployment on edge devices to improve the efficiency of precision agriculture in plant disease detection.