Cotton Disease Detection Based on ConvNeXt and Attention Mechanisms

Cotton diseases cause low cotton production and fiber quality. Disease detection methods based on deep learning can integrate feature extraction and improve identification accuracy. We present an automatic cotton disease detection method to improve the identification accuracy of cotton disease. Cotton images are collected using a quadruped robot. ConvNeXt integrates the convolution neural network architecture with intrinsic superiority of transformer. The multiscale spatial pyramid attention (MSPA) module can help ConvNeXt concentrate on important regions of feature maps. ConvNeXt with the MSPA module shows the best recognition results of 97.2%, 99.7% and 100.0% on one competition dataset and two cotton datasets, respectively, with little increase in inference time. It indicates that the proposed model performs well in recognition accuracy with fast detection speed.