An Efficient and Small Convolutional Neural Network for Pest Recognition -- ExquisiteNet
This work addresses the problem of automated pest recognition for farmers to reduce pesticide overuse and environmental harm, though it is incremental as it builds on existing lightweight model designs.
The authors tackled pest recognition for agriculture by proposing ExquisiteNet, a small and efficient convolutional neural network with 0.98M parameters, achieving 52.32% accuracy on the IP102 benchmark without data augmentation, comparable in speed to SqueezeNet.
Nowadays, due to the rapid population expansion, food shortage has become a critical issue. In order to stabilizing the food source production, preventing crops from being attacked by pests is very important. In generally, farmers use pesticides to kill pests, however, improperly using pesticides will also kill some insects which is beneficial to crops, such as bees. If the number of bees is too few, the supplement of food in the world will be in short. Besides, excessive pesticides will seriously pollute the environment. Accordingly, farmers need a machine which can automatically recognize the pests. Recently, deep learning is popular because its effectiveness in the field of image classification. In this paper, we propose a small and efficient model called ExquisiteNet to complete the task of recognizing the pests and we expect to apply our model on mobile devices. ExquisiteNet mainly consists of two blocks. One is double fusion with squeeze-and-excitation-bottleneck block (DFSEB block), and the other is max feature expansion block (ME block). ExquisiteNet only has 0.98M parameters and its computing speed is very fast almost the same as SqueezeNet. In order to evaluate our model's performance, we test our model on a benchmark pest dataset called IP102. Compared to many state-of-the-art models, such as ResNet101, ShuffleNetV2, MobileNetV3-large and EfficientNet etc., our model achieves higher accuracy, that is, 52.32% on the test set of IP102 without any data augmentation.