THz image recognition of moldy wheat based on multi-scale context and feature pyramid

Wheat is susceptible to mold growth due to storage conditions, which subsequently affects its quality; therefore, timely and rapid identification of moldy wheat is critically important. In order to achieve high-precision recognition and class classification of wheat with different degrees of mold, a multi-scale context and feature pyramid based moldy wheat recognition network (MSCFP-Net) is proposed. Firstly, the network uses the residual network ResNeXt as the baseline network, and incorporates a multi-scale contextual feature extraction module, which is more helpful to determine the important discriminative regions in the whole image to extract more image detail features. In addition, a coordinated attention mechanism module is introduced to perform global average pooling from both directions to learn the importance of different regions in the input features in a dynamically weighted manner. Moreover, a bidirectional feature pyramid network is embedded into the baseline model, so that certain coarse-grained features and fine-grained features are retained in the processed output features at the same time to improve the network recognition accuracy. Compared with the baseline network, the four evaluation indexes of Accuracy, Precision, Recall and F1-Score of MSCFP-Net are improved by 1.08%, 1.25%, 0.53% and 0.91%, respectively. In addition, a series of comparison experiments and ablation experiments show that the classification network constructed in this paper has the best fine-grained classification performance for moldy wheat THz images.