A Plant Leaf Disease Image Classification Method Integrating Capsule Network and Residual Network

In response to the challenge that traditional convolutional neural networks face in effectively capturing the posture and spatial relationships of plant disease lesions on leaves, leading to issues of low recognition accuracy and poor robustness, this paper proposes a plant leaf disease image classification method that integrates capsule networks and residual networks. Firstly, by optimizing and refining the traditional residual network (ResNet), the initial convolutional layer of ResNet is enhanced by replacing its kernel with a concatenation of
$3\times 3$
small convolutional kernels, aiming to more effectively extract features of plant leaf lesions. Subsequently, a channel attention mechanism is introduced into the residual block to heighten the model’s focus on crucial features. Finally, the improved ResNet is effectively integrated with the capsule network (CapsNet). The initial pooling layer of ResNet is removed to reduce the loss of positional information. The output of the third residual module of ResNet is then connected with CapsNet, fully leveraging the strengths of both networks to enhance the model’s robustness. Train and test the model on the PlantVillage, AI Challenger 2018, and Tomato Leaf Disease datasets and conduct comparative experiments with other typical classification models. The proposed SE-SK-CapResNet model has demonstrated a remarkable ability to accurately recognize diseased leaves, achieving an accuracy rate of 98.58%, 95.08%, and 97.19%, respectively. Furthermore, this model has exhibited superior performance in image rotation transformations and classification compared to traditional network models. These experimental results suggest that the SE-SK-CapResNet model is a promising solution for the detection of diseased leaves in the field of agriculture.