A Binary Neural Network with Dual Attention for Plant Disease Classification

Plant disease control has long been a critical issue in agricultural production and relies heavily on the identification of plant diseases, but traditional disease identification requires extensive experience. Most of the existing deep learning-based plant disease classification methods run on high-performance devices to meet the requirements for classification accuracy. However, agricultural applications have strict cost control and cannot be widely promoted. This paper presents a novel method for plant disease classification using a binary neural network with dual attention (DABNN), which can save computational resources and accelerate by using binary neural networks, and introduces a dual-attention mechanism to improve the accuracy of classification. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we conduct experiments on the PlantVillage dataset, which includes a range of diseases. The F1score and Accuracy of our method reach 99.39% and 99.4%, respectively. Meanwhile, compared to AlexNet and VGG16, the Computationalcomplexity of our method is reduced by 72.3% and 98.7%, respectively. The Paramssize of our algorithm is 5.4% of AlexNet and 2.3% of VGG16. The experimental results show that DABNN can identify various diseases effectively and accurately.