Attention-Based Light Weight Deep Learning Models for Early Potato Disease Detection

Potato crop has become integral part of our diet due to its wide use in variety of dishes, making it an important food crop. Its importance also stems from the fact that it is one of the cheapest vegetables available throughout the year. This makes it crucial to keep potato prices affordable for developing countries where the majority of the population falls under the middle-income bracket. Consequently, there is a need to develop a robust, effective, and portable technique to detect diseases in potato plant leaves. In this work, an attention-based disease detection technique is proposed. This technique selectively focuses on specific parts of an image which reveal the disease. This technique leverages transfer learning combined with two attention modules: the channel attention module and spatial attention module. By focusing on specific parts of the images, the proposed technique is able to achieve almost similar accuracy with significantly fewer parameters. The proposed technique has been validated using four pre-trained models: DenseNet169, XceptionNet, MobileNet, and VGG16. All of these models are able to achieve almost the same level of training and validation accuracy, around 90–97%, even after reducing the number of parameters by 40–50%. It shows that the proposed technique effectively reduces model complexity without compromising performance.