Maize leaf disease recognition based on improved MSRCR and OSCRNet

Abstract

Accurate identification of maize pests and diseases plays a crucial role in the growth and yield of maize. The recognition method of maize leaf diseases based on deep learning is currently a research hotspot. In practical applications, it is difficult to ensure a high recognition accuracy due to the impact of environmental factors (such as light intensity, background noise) and insufficient training data. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a maize image recognition method based on image enhancement and OSCRNet. Firstly, a maize leaf image enhancement framework and algorithm based on improved MSRCR were designed to enhance the characteristics of the maize leaf in a complex environment and to solve the problems of high noise and blur of maize images. Subsequently, the OSCRNet maize leaf recognition network model was established, which uses octave convolution with characteristics to accelerate network training and reduce unnecessary redundant spatial information in maize leaf images. Additionally, a self-calibrated convolution with multi-scale features was employed to realize the interactions of different feature information in the maize leaf images, enhance feature extraction, and solve the problems of similarity of maize disease features and easy learning disorders. Concurrently, batch normalization was employed to prevent network overfitting and enhance the robustness of the model. The experimental results showed that the highest identification accuracy of the proposed method for rust, gray leaf disease, northern wilt disease, and healthy maize are 96.67%, 94.86%, 92.81%, and 95.63%, respectively. Our methods were beneficial in solving the problems of slow efficiency, low accuracy and insufficient training data, and also outperformed other comparison models. The proposed method demonstrates strong robustness for maize disease images collected in the natural environment, providing a reference for the intelligent diagnosis of other plant leaf diseases.