A Channel Attention-Driven Optimized CNN for Efficient Early Detection of Plant Diseases in Resource Constrained Environment

Abstract

Agriculture is a cornerstone of economic prosperity, but plant diseases can severely impact crop yield and quality. Identifying these diseases accurately is often difficult due to limited expert availability and ambiguous information. Early detection and automated diagnosis systems are crucial to mitigate these challenges. To address this, we propose a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) designed for resource-constrained devices termed as LeafNet. LeafNet draws inspiration from the block-wise VGG19 architecture but incorporates several optimizations, including a reduced number of parameters, smaller input size, and faster inference time while maintaining competitive accuracy. The proposed LeafNet leverages small, uniform convolutional filters to capture fine-grained details of plant disease features, with an increasing number of channels to enhance feature extraction. Additionally, it integrates channel attention mechanisms to prioritize disease-related features effectively. We evaluated the proposed method on four datasets: the benchmark plant village (PV), the data repository of leaf images (DRLIs), the newly curated plant composite (PC) dataset, and the BARI Sunflower (BARI-Sun) dataset, which includes diverse and challenging real-world images. The results show that the proposed performs comparably to state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, false positive rate (FPR), model size, and runtime, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物病害の画像ベース診断を目的とする軽量CNNを開発し、複数データセットで精度・誤検出率・モデルサイズ・推論時間を評価しており、病害状態の表現型推定手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's authors publicly released their LeafNet analysis code on GitHub, and the plant leaf image datasets used for their phenotyping experiments (PV, DRLI, BARI-Sun) are openly available. The PC dataset is a composite of PV and DRLI and is not independently deposited.