Lightweight Model Improvement and Application for Rice Disease Classification

Abstract

The timely and correct identification of rice diseases is essential to ensuring rice productivity. However, many methods have drawbacks such as slow recognition speed, low recognition accuracy and overly complex models that are unfavorable for portability. Therefore, this study proposes an improved model for accurately classifying rice diseases based on a two-level routing attention mechanism and dynamic convolution based on the above difficulties. The model employs Alterable Kernel Convolution with dynamic, irregularly shaped convolutional kernels and Bi-level Routing Attention that utilizes sparsity to reduce parameters and involves a GPU-friendly dense matrix multiplication, which can achieve high-precision rice disease recognition while ensuring lightweight and recognition speed. The model successfully classified 10 species, including nine diseased and healthy rice, with 97.31% accuracy and a 97.18% F1-score. Our proposed method outperforms MobileNetV3-large, EfficientNet-b0, Swin Transformer-tiny and ResNet-50 by 1.73%, 1.82%, 1.25% and 0.67%, respectively. Meanwhile, the model contains only (Formula presented.) parameters and achieves an inference time of 6.13 s, which facilitates deployment on mobile devices.The proposed MobileViT_BiAK method effectively identifies rice diseases while providing a lightweight and high-performance classification solution.