Squeeze-and-Excitation networks and attention mechanism in automatic detection of coffee leaf diseases based on images

This research examines the effectiveness of Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks (SENet) combined with Attention Mechanism for automated detection of coffee leaf diseases. The integration of SENet and Attention Mechanism presents a promising technological opportunity as SENet has proven effective in improving CNN performance by modeling channel interdependencies, while Attention Mechanism enables focused feature extraction on crucial leaf areas - a combination that remains underexplored in coffee leaf disease detection. Using a combination of three datasets: Coffee Leaf Diseases, Disease and Pest in Coffee Leaves, and RoCoLe.Original, comprising 3,177 coffee leaf images divided into four classes (Healthy, Miner, Phoma, and Rust), this study compares the performance of SENet against other deep learning architectures such as InceptionV3, ResNet101V2, and MobileNet. Experiments were conducted with variations in epochs (15 and 30), three data split ratios, and three optimizer types. Results demonstrate that SENet with Attention mechanism performs, achieving a peak accuracy of 96% at 30 epochs with an 80:20 data ratio and RMSprop optimizer. InceptionV3 and MobileNet showed competitive performance with 93% accuracy, while ResNet101V2 achieved 81%. Class-wise analysis reveals SENet's proficiency in detecting various coffee leaf diseases, with F1-scores 91% for all classes.