Flower image classification based on an improved lightweight neural network with multi-scale feature fusion and attention mechanism.

In order to solve the problem that deep learning-based flower image classification methods lose more feature information in the early feature extraction process, and the model takes up more storage space, a new lightweight neural network model based on multi-scale feature fusion and attention mechanism is proposed in this paper. First, the AlexNet model is chosen as the basic framework. Second, a multi-scale feature fusion module (MFFM) is used to replace the shallow single-scale convolution. MFFM, which contains three depthwise separable convolution branches with different sizes, can fuse features with different scales and reduce the feature loss caused by single-scale convolution. Third, two layers of improved Inception module are first added to enhance the extraction of deep features, and a layer of hybrid attention module is added to strengthen the focus of the model on key information at a later stage. Finally, the flower image classification is completed using a combination of global average pooling and fully connected layers. The experimental results demonstrate that our lightweight model has fewer parameters, takes up less storage space and has higher classification accuracy than the baseline model, which helps to achieve more accurate flower image recognition on mobile devices.