Crop pest detection by three-scale convolutional neural network with attention

PLoS One. 2023 Jun 2;18(6):e0276456. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0276456. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

Crop pests seriously affect the yield and quality of crop. To timely and accurately control crop pests is particularly crucial for crop security, quality of life and a stable agricultural economy. Crop pest detection in field is an essential step to control the pests. The existing convolutional neural network (CNN) based pest detection methods are not satisfactory for small pest recognition and detection in field because the pests are various with different colors, shapes and poses. A three-scale CNN with attention (TSCNNA) model is constructed for crop pest detection by adding the channel attention and spatial mechanisms are introduced into CNN. TSCNNA can improve the interest of CNN for pest detection with different sizes under complicated background, and enlarge the receptive field of CNN, so as to improve the accuracy of pest detection. Experiments are carried out on the image set of common crop pests, and the precision is 93.16%, which is 5.1% and 3.7% higher than ICNN and VGG16, respectively. The results show that the proposed method can achieve both high speed and high accuracy of crop pest detection. This proposed method has certain practical significance of real-time crop pest control in the field.

MeSH terms

  • Agriculture
  • Attention
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Pest Control
  • Quality of Life*

Grants and funding

This work is supported in the form of grants by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 62172338 and 62072378) awarded to SZ, and Xijing University High-level Talent Special Fund Project (No. XJ21B14) awarded to XW.