AMA-Net: Adaptive Masking Attention Network for Agricultural Crop Classification From UAV Images

Agriculture crop classification is helpful for agricultural production. However, it is challenging to classify crops from the agriculture image suffering from these problems: 1) Crops are often masked in complex backgrounds; 2) There is high similarity between crop categories. To address these problems, an adaptive masking attention network (AMA-Net) is proposed for agriculture crop identification from natural images, where the adaptive masking (AM) module is developed to distinguish the crop from the complex background by selectively eliminating redundant information of feature maps, and the fair attention module is devised to identify similar crops between categories by modeling the fine-grained features. Experiments conducted on the benchmark show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed AMA-Net, achieving the performance of 96.65%, 96.65%, 97.13%, and 96.72% on the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, respectively, which is better than other state-of-the-art methods.