Critical Information Mining Network: Identifying Crop Diseases in Noisy Environments

When agricultural experts explore the use of artificial intelligence technology to identify and detect crop diseases, they mainly focus on the research of a stable environment, but ignore the problem of noise in the process of image acquisition in real situations. To solve this problem, we propose an innovative solution called the Critical Information Mining Network (CIMNet). Compared with traditional models, CIMNet has higher recognition accuracy and wider application scenarios. The network has a good effect on crop disease recognition under noisy environments, and can effectively deal with the interference of noise to the recognition effect in actual farmland scenes. Consider that the shape of the leaves can be symmetrical or asymmetrical.First, we introduce the Non-Local Attention Module (Non-Local), which uses a unique self-attention mechanism to fully capture the context information of the image. The module overcomes the limitation of traditional convolutional neural networks that only rely on local features and ignore global features. Global features are particularly important when the image is disturbed by noise. Non-Local improves a more comprehensive visual understanding of crop disease recognition. Secondly, we have innovatively designed a Multi-scale Critical Information Fusion Module (MSCM). The module uses the Key Information Extraction Module (KIB) to dig into the shallow key features in the network deeply. The shallow key features strengthen the feature perception of the model to the noise image through texture and contour information, and then the shallow key features and deep features are fused to enrich the original deep feature information of the network. Finally, we conducted experiments on two public datasets, and the results showed that the accuracy of our model in crop disease identification under a noisy environment was significantly improved. At the same time, our model also showed excellent performance under stable conditions. The results of this study provide favorable support for the improvement of crop production efficiency.