RGSGAN–MACRNet: A More Accurate Recognition Method for Imperfect Corn Kernels Under Sample-Size-Limited Conditions

Under sample-size-limited conditions, the recognition accuracy of imperfect corn kernels is severely degraded. To address this issue, a recognition framework that integrates a Residual Generative Spatial-Channel Synergistic Attention Generative Adversarial Network (RGSGAN) with a Multi-Scale Asymmetric Convolutional Residual Network (MACRNet) was proposed. First, residual structures and a spatial-channel synergistic attention mechanism are incorporated into the RGSGAN generator, and the Wasserstein distance with gradient penalty is integrated to produce high-quality samples and expand the dataset. On this basis, the MACRNet employs a multi-branch asymmetric convolutional residual module to perform multi-scale feature fusion, thereby substantially enhancing its ability to capture subtle textural and local structural variations in imperfect corn kernels. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method attains a classification accuracy of 98.813%, surpassing ResNet18, EfficientNet-v2, ConvNeXt-T, and ConvNeXt-v2 by 8.3%, 6.16%, 3.01%, and 4.09%, respectively, and outperforms the model trained on the original dataset by 5.29%. These results confirm the superior performance of the proposed approach under sample-size-limited conditions, effectively alleviating the adverse impact of data scarcity on the recognition accuracy of imperfect corn kernels.