CNDD-Net: A Lightweight Attention-Based Convolutional Neural Network for Classifying Corn Nutritional Deficiencies and Leaf Diseases

Plant diseases and nutrient deficiencies pose significant challenges to food production, making it crucial to identify them accurately and quickly, as their symptoms can often be similar. Prompt and precise detection is essential to implement effective measures that prevent crop losses. While computer vision techniques have demonstrated effectiveness in classification, their high computational demands have limited their adoption by farmers in the field. In this study, a Corn leaf Nutrition Deficiency and Disease network (CNDD-net) is designed based on the ResNet framework, incorporating a depth-wise separable convolution and a convolutional block attention module for a lightweight, high-performance model. The models underwent training, validation, and testing using a corn leaf nutrition deficiencies and diseases data set with seven classes implementing five-fold cross-validation. The performance of the models is assessed using average accuracy, GFLOPs, number of parameters, and model size. Following experiments involving the manipulation of the position of the attention module, the number of feature maps, and the depth of the network, the model was finalised. The CNDD-net design has a model size of 0.24 MB with 48,041 parameters and a GFLOPs of 0.18, providing an average accuracy of 96.71%. Compared to conventional models, this research demonstrates optimal performance and computational complexity, offering an efficient, lightweight solution to identify nutritional deficiencies and diseases of corn leaf, thus supporting sustainable agriculture.