Deep Learning-Based Identification of Maize Leaf Diseases Is Improved by an Attention Mechanism: Self-Attention

Maize leaf diseases significantly reduce maize yield; therefore, monitoring and identifying the diseases during the growing season are crucial. Some of the current studies are based on images with simple backgrounds, and the realistic field settings are full of background noise, making this task challenging. We collected low-cost red, green, and blue (RGB) images from our experimental fields and public dataset, and they contain a total of four categories, namely, southern corn leaf blight (SCLB), gray leaf spot (GLS), southern corn rust (SR), and healthy (H). This article proposes a model different from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based on transformer and self-attention. It represents visual information of local regions of images by tokens, calculates the correlation (called attention) of information between local regions with an attention mechanism, and finally integrates global information to make the classification. The results show that our model achieves the best performance compared to five mainstream CNNs at a meager computational cost, and the attention mechanism plays an extremely important role. The disease lesions information was effectively emphasized, and the background noise was suppressed. The proposed model is more suitable for fine-grained maize leaf disease identification in a complex background, and we demonstrated this idea from three perspectives, namely, theoretical, experimental, and visualization.