Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 189 (2021) 106367

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Computers and Electronics in Agriculture

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compag

Original papers

Lightweight convolutional neural network model for field wheat ear

disease identification
Wenxia Bao a, Xinghua Yang a, Dong Liang a, Gensheng Hu a, 1, *, Xianjun Yang b
a
National Engineering Research Center for Agro-Ecological Big Data Analysis & Application, Anhui University, Hefei, Anhui, China
b
Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei 230031, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Manual diagnosis of crop diseases has high cost and low efficiency and has become increasingly unsuitable for
Wheat ear disease the needs of modern agricultural production. This study designed a lightweight convolutional neural network
Target identification (CNN) model called SimpleNet for the automatic identification of wheat ear diseases, such as glume blotch and
Lightweight convolutional neural network
scab, in natural scene images taken in the field. SimpleNet was constructed using convolution and inverted
Attention mechanism
residual blocks. In this study, Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), which combines spatial attention
Feature fusion
mechanism and channel attention mechanism, was introduced into inverted residual blocks to improve the
representation ability of the model for disease features so that the model pays attention to important features,
suppresses unnecessary features, and reduces the influence of complex backgrounds in the images. In addition,
this study designed a feature fusion module to concatenate the down-sampled feature maps output by inverted
residual blocks and the average pooling features of the feature maps that input inverted residual blocks to realize
the fusion between features of different depths to reduce the loss of the detailed features of wheat ear diseases
caused by the networks in the down-sampling process and solve the disappearance of disease features in the
process of image feature extraction. Experimental results show that the proposed SimpleNet model achieved an
identification accuracy of 94.1% on the test data set, which is higher than that of classic CNN models, such as
VGG16, ResNet50, and AlexNet, and lightweight CNN models, such as MobileNet V1, V2, and V3. SimpleNet has
only 2.13 M parameters, which is less than those of MobileNet V1, V2, and V3-Large. The designed model can be
used for the automatic identification of wheat ear diseases on the mobile terminal.

1. Introduction
Wheat is a cereal crop that is widely planted all over the world. The
yield and quality of wheat have an important impact on human life.
However, wheat ears in most planting areas are often infected by one or
more diseases (Manavalan 2020). The common wheat ear diseases in
most areas in China are wheat glume blotch and wheat scab. Infected
wheat ears will show corresponding symptoms, which are used by
experienced agricultural experts to determine diseases. Wheat glume
blotch is a fungal disease caused by the infection of Septoria nodorum
Berk. After wheat ears are infected with wheat glume blotch, the older
parts of the infected tissue in the wheat ears turn from light gray–brown
to chocolate brown, and pycnidia (small, brown, spore-producing fungal
fruiting bodies) are formed. The brown–black edges of the lesions
continue to expand along the plant tissue. Wheat glume blotch damages
the ears, leaves, stems, and other parts of wheat and causes a 30%
reduction in grain production in severe cases (Lin et al. 2020; Ficke et al.
2018). Wheat scab is caused by the infection of Fusarium graminearum. In
the early stage of infection, water-stained light brown spots appear on
spikelet and glumes, and when the humidity is high, a pink gelatinous
mold layer appears at the spots. The fungus grows through the rachis to
invade spike-lets until the entire head takes on a bleached appearance,
often with a salmon-pink tint. Wheat scab can reduce the yield and
produce several mycotoxins that are harmful to humans and animals
(Wang et al. 2019). Identifying fungal diseases in crops is a very pro­
fessional job (Barbedo and Garcia 2016). In the rural areas of China, the
contact between farmers and plant protection experts is very limited
because of geographical conditions, economic costs, and other factors.
Therefore, the research of a wheat ear disease identification method that
has relatively low computing power and can be transplanted to mobile

* Corresponding author at: Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China.

E-mail address: hugs2906@sina.com (G. Hu).
1
Contact Address: School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Anhui University, Jiulong Road, Hefei, Anhui Province, China.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2021.106367
Received 25 May 2021; Received in revised form 27 July 2021; Accepted 1 August 2021
Available online 19 August 2021
0168-1699/© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
W. Bao et al.
phones and other mobile devices is of great importance to assist farmers
in identifying wheat ear diseases and improving wheat yield and quality
(Picon et al., 2019a).
With the development of computer vision technology, many re­
searchers used machine learning and image processing methods to
identify crop diseases. Tian et al. (2011) extracted the color, shape, and
texture features of wheat leaves suffering from powdery mildew, rust,
leaf blotch, and other fungal diseases and then used support vector
machines to classify the features to identify diseases. Majumdar et al.
(2015) adopted fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm to extract wheat leaf
disease features and artificial neural network (ANN) to classify the
extracted features to determine whether wheat is diseased. Prasad et al.
(2016) combined Gabor wavelet transform and gray level co-occurrence
matrix to extract the multiresolution features of plant leaf diseases and
used a k-nearest neighbor classification method for the identification of
diseases; this algorithm can be transplanted to the Android system.
Moshou et al. (2004) studied the difference in spectral reflectance be­
tween healthy wheat and wheat with yellow rust and developed a yellow
rust detection algorithm based on multilayer perceptron. Traditional
machine learning methods have achieved good results in several specific
applications. These methods use feature engineering to design manual
features, such as color, texture, and edge gradient, of wheat ear diseases
in wheat images. However, the color and texture of diseased wheat ears
are similar to those of weeds and wheat leaves in wheat images with
complex backgrounds, leading to false identification of the disease.
In recent years, deep learning methods, especially convolutional
neural networks (CNNs), have produced remarkable results in image
identification. CNNs can simulate human vision and divide features into
low-level and high-level features. Low-level features are similar to the
designed features in traditional machine learning methods, but several
high-level features can be learned through CNNs. Moreover, CNNs
transform the feature representation of images in the original space into
a new feature space via layer feature transformation, which makes the
identification of wheat ear diseases by deep learning methods more
accurate than that by traditional machine learning methods. Many
current studies have used CNNs for crop disease identification. Fer­
entinos (2018) used CNNs to identify 58 diseases in 25 plants in the
public data set, PlantVillage (Hughes and Salathé 2015), and compared
the identification effects of different CNNs. Liang et al. (2019) proposed
a deep learning model called “PD2SE-Net” to automatically identify
diseases on crop leaves and disease severity. Bao et al. (2021) took
powdery mildew and stripe rust as research objects and proposed an
algorithm for identifying wheat leaf diseases and their severity based on
elliptical-maximum margin criterion metric learning. Jin et al. (2018)
reconstructed the spectral data of wheat ears into a 2-D data structure
suitable for CNN input and then used CNNs to classify the data to
distinguish healthy wheat ears from scab. Su et al. (2019) used the im­
ages of eight kinds of wheat leaf diseases as the research object and used
local support vector machine (LSVM) instead of softmax as the classifier
of the CNN to alleviate the misclassification caused by data imbalance.
Esgario et al. (2020) proposed a multi-task architecture based on CNN to
classify and identify the severity of diseases in the collected coffee leaf
data set. Karlekar and Seal (2020)) removed the backgrounds of images
according to the color characteristics of soybean leaves and then used
CNN for the identification of soybean leaf diseases on the images after
removing the backgrounds. These CNN models identified crop diseases
on images collected under manual control conditions and had achieved
good results. However, crop disease images collected in natural scenes in
the field usually have complex backgrounds and uneven light, which
reduces the identification accuracy of the models. Lu et al. (2017)
designed a field wheat disease diagnosis system based on weakly su­
pervised deep learning. The system used multi-instance learning to
realize the identification of field wheat diseases and disease region.
Picon et al. (2019b) photographed five crops (wheat, barley, corn, rice,
and rape) in the field, combined non-image context information (crop
information) with image information, and used three CNN models to
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Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 189 (2021) 106367
identify diseases. Hu et al. (2019) extracted the color features of tea
spots, used support vector machine to segment the spots, and then used a
VGG16 model to identify the segmented images. Hu et al. (2021)
improved the Faster R-CNN and used the pyramid region proposal
network of a feature pyramid network to improve the detection per­
formance of blurred, occluded, and small diseased tea leaves in natural
scenes. The model’s anti-interference ability against complex back­
grounds can be improved by removing image backgrounds, introducing
additional information, and improving the CNN model structure. How­
ever, the numerous parameters and calculations of the model hinder its
direct transplantation to mobile devices.
Google has designed a series of lightweight CNN models of Mobile­
Net to make the deep CNN model run on mobile devices; these models’
effect in public data sets is not inferior to classic CNN models, such as
AlexNet, VGG16, and Inception V3, and can be transplanted to mobile
devices. Kamal et al. (2019) used depthwise separable convolution in
MobileNet to construct a lightweight CNN model for plant disease leaf
classification in the PlantVillage dataset. The parameters of this network
model are less than those of classical CNN models. Barman et al. (2020)
adopted their own CNN and MobileNet that can be applied to mobile
terminal to identify diseased citrus leaves. Singh et al. (2021) fine-tuned
multiple pre-trained MobileNet models to identify coconut tree diseases.
The identification accuracy of MobileNet is better than those of other
classical CNNs; MobileNet is also deployed in Web programs. Bi et al.
(2020) used MobileNet to identify apple leaf spot and rust. The identi­
fication accuracy is similar to the existing complex CNN models, but the
computational complexity is slightly lower.
A lightweight CNN model, SimpleNet, was designed for the auto­
matic identification of wheat ear diseases, such as glume blight and scab,
in natural scenes in the field and to solve the problems of complex
backgrounds, large number of parameters, and high cost of CNN models.
The model uses lightweight module for feature extraction, adds atten­
tion mechanism module to suppress complex background information to
improve the network’s ability to express disease features, and uses
feature fusion method to reduce the loss of useful information in the
process of down-sampling. Experimental results show that the identifi­
cation accuracy of the proposed model is higher than those of some
classical and lightweight CNN models, and its parameter quantity is like
those of MobileNet series (V1, V2, and V3) and other lightweight CNN
models.
The contributions of this study include the following:
(1) A lightweight CNN model named SimpleNet was designed for the
automatic identification of wheat ear diseases in the field.
(2) A CBAM module that combines the spatial attention mechanism
and the channel attention mechanism was introduced to the
inverted residual block in the SimpleNet model to improve the
representation ability of the model for disease features and
reduce the influence of complex backgrounds in the image on the
identification performance of the model.
(3) A feature fusion module was designed to concatenate shallow
features with deep features to reduce the damage to the detailed
features of wheat ear diseases during the down-sampling process
of the model.
(4) SimpleNet has only 2.13 M parameters and achieved an identi­
fication accuracy of 94.1% on the test data set. It can be used for
the automatic identification of wheat ear diseases on mobile
devices.
2. Materials and method
2.1. Image acquisition
The images used in this study were obtained from Anhui Agricultural
University Industry-University Research Base, Guohe Town, Hefei City,
Anhui Province, China (31◦ 25′ –31◦ 42′ N, 117◦ 09′ –117◦ 16′ E). The
W. Bao et al. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 189 (2021) 106367

Fig. 1. Image acquisition area.

Fig. 2. Some images of wheat ears.

image acquisition area is shown in Fig. 1. The Base is responsible for
research on the phenotypic information of various crops, such as wheat,
rice, and corn. Wheat varieties, such as ‘Yangmai No. 13,’ ‘Yangmai No.
19,’ ‘Ningmai No. 9,’ ‘Ningmai No. 24,’ ‘Sumai,’ and ‘Lemai,’ were
planted in the Base. The image acquisition time was from May 4, 2019 to
May 6, 2019. Considering the growth characteristics of winter wheat
and the influence of light intensity on image quality, the shooting was
selected from 3 pm to 6 pm. The shooting devices were a digital camera
(Canon EOS 600D) and a mobile phone (Redmi Note5). Canon EOS 600D
is a digital SLR camera released by Canon Japan on February 11, 2011. It
has full-pixel, dual-core, CMOS AF focusing technology and a 9-point
full cross focusing system. The effective number of pixels is 18
million, and the sensor size is APS-C (22.3 × 14.9 mm). Redmi Note 5 is
a mobile phone released by Xiaomi on March 16, 2018. It is equipped
with 12 + 5 million pixel dual cameras. The 5 million pixels are mainly
used to obtain depth of field information, and the 12-million-pixel main
camera has Dual PD dual-core focusing. Wheat ears suffering from scab
and glume blight and healthy wheat ears were selected as the objects for
shooting. The camera’s mode was set to auto exposure and auto focus.
The lens was 20–50 cm away from the canopy with an angle of 0◦ –40◦
with the horizontal plane. The resolution of the images captured by the
camera was 3456 × 2304 and 5184 × 3456, and the resolution of the
images captured by the mobile phone was 4000 × 3000. A total of 568
wheat ear images were collected, including 183 wheat glume blotch
images, 280 wheat scab images, and 105 healthy wheat ear images.
Some images of wheat ears are shown in Fig. 2. The first line shows
the images of wheat ears with glume blotch, which are labeled “0′′ . The
second line shows the images of wheat ears with scab, which are labeled

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”1′′ . The third line shows the images of healthy wheat ears, which are
labeled “2′′ . The shapes of the wheat ears in the images are different, the
image backgrounds are complex, the light is uneven, and the severity of
the diseases is varied. The identification of wheat ear diseases in natural
scenes of the field is a very challenging work.

2.2. Image preprocessing and sample augmentation

Fig. 3. Schematic diagram of the Retinex principle.
(1) Image preprocessing

The color of wheat images obtained from natural scenes in the field
will be different from that perceived by vision because of the change in

Table 1
Sample distribution after augmentation.
Disease Number of training Number of validation Number of test
images (Aug) images (Aug) images

Wheat glume 375 63 55

Fig. 4. Overall process of the Retinex algorithm. blotch
Wheat scab 566 94 84
Healthy 264 44 31
Total 1205 201 170

(a) Original images

(b) Images enhanced using the Retinex algorithm

Fig. 5. Original images and the images enhanced using the Retinex algorithm.

Fig. 6. Some of the augmented images.

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W. Bao et al.
Fig. 7. Structure of SimpleNet model.
light intensity, which affects the effect of the CNN on disease feature
extraction. This study used single-scale Retinex algorithm for image
enhancement to reduce the influence of uneven light on images. As
shown in Fig. 3, the image obtained by human vision is composed of
luminance and reflected images, as follows (Sun et al., 2020):
S(x, y) = R(x, y)∙L(x, y) (1)
where R(x,y) represents the reflected image, L(x,y) represents the
luminance image, S(x,y) is the visual image captured by the human eye
or camera, and (x,y) is the coordinate of the pixel in the image. To
extract R(x,y) from S(x,y), R(x,y) can be expressed as
S(x, y)
R(x, y) = (2)
L(x, y)
Logarithmic transformation of Formula (2) can be obtained:
logR(x, y) = logS(x, y) − logL(x, y) (3)
If the value of L(x,y) is estimated, R(x,y) can be calculated according to
Formula (3). The intensity of incident light usually changes slowly on
the illuminated surface, so L(x, y) can be represented by the low-
frequency components in the image. The illuminance change is
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Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 189 (2021) 106367
estimated and removed by calculating the weighted average F(x,y) be­
tween the pixels in the original image and the surrounding region, and
only the reflection properties of the object are retained. The luminance
image L(x,y) can be expressed as
L(x, y) = F(x, y)*S(x, y) (4)
where F(x,y) is a low-pass filtering function. Through the low-pass
filtering of F(x,y) to S(x,y), the luminance image L(x,y)can be esti­
mated. Then, we have
logR(x, y) = logS(x, y) − log[F(x, y)*S(x, y)] (5)
Thus, transform logR(x,y) into the real number domain, the reflection
image R(x,y) can be obtained from the human visual image S(x,y) to
achieve the purpose of image enhancement. The overall process of the
Retinex algorithm is shown in Fig. 4.
Several examples of the enhanced image are shown in Fig. 5. Fig. 5
(a) shows the original images, and Fig. 5(b) shows the images enhanced
using the Retinex algorithm.
(2) Sample augmentation
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(a) Stride = 1

(b) Stride = 2

Fig. 8. Inverted residual blocks.

(a) Ordinary convolution

(b) Depthwise separable convolution

Fig. 9. Schematic of ordinary convolution and depthwise separable convolution.

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W. Bao et al.
Fig. 10. Feature fusion module.
Fig. 11. Structure of the inverted residual block with CBAM.
The number of diseased wheat ear images obtained was limited
because of economic and physical limitations. Thus, the number of
training samples should be expanded to increase the diversity of samples
in the training image, prevent the model from overfitting, and make the
model have strong generalization ability to natural scene images.
The enhanced wheat ear images were divided into training, valida­
tion, and test sets according to the ratio, 6:1:3. The number of training
and validation images was expanded by horizontal flip, rotation, and
translation. Some of the expanded images are shown in Fig. 6.
The sample distribution after augmentation is shown in Table 1. We
obtained 1205 training images and 201 validation images after sample
augmentation. The 170 test images were not augmented.
2.3. SimpleNet model
2.3.1. Model structure
This study designed a lightweight CNN model called SimpleNet for
automatic identification of wheat ear diseases in the field. By intro­
ducing CBAM modules and designing feature fusion modules, SimpleNet
can accurately extract the features from images of wheat ear diseases
with complex backgrounds. SimpleNet is a lightweight CNN model, so it
is suitable for mobile devices. The structure of SimpleNet is shown in
Fig. 7. It is mainly composed of convolution blocks, inverted residual
blocks (Howard et al. 2019), average pooling layers, and classifier
blocks. A 3 × 3 convolution layer in the first convolution block of
SimpleNet is used to obtain rich feature representations of images. Seven
inverted residual blocks are connected after the first convolution block
to increase the depth of CNN with a small number of parameters and
improve the nonlinear representation capability of the model. The
average pooling layers are used to decrease the spatial dimension of the
feature maps and increase the receptive field of the model. The last
classifier block uses the softmax function to realize disease classification.
In this study, the attention mechanism module CBAM (Woo et al.
2018) was added to the inverted residual blocks of SimpleNet to allow
SimpleNet to focus on wheat ear disease regions in the image and reduce
the influence of complex backgrounds on disease identification.
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Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 189 (2021) 106367
Meanwhile, a feature fusion module was designed to concatenate the
down-sampled feature maps produced by the inverted residual blocks
and the average pooling features of the feature maps that were inputted
to the inverted residual blocks to realize the fusion of shallow and deep
features. The module can reduce the loss of detailed features of wheat
ear diseases caused by the networks in the down-sampling process and
solve the problem of disease features disappearing in the process of
image feature extraction. The details of the feature fusion and CBAM
modules are introduced in Sections 2.3.2 and 2.3.3.
2.3.2. Feature fusion module
The structure of inverted residual block in Fig. 7 is shown in Fig. 8.
The inverted residual block is formed by concatenating ordinary
convolution and depthwise separable convolution. As can be seen in
Fig. 8(a), ordinary convolution with a kernel size of 1 × 1 increases the
number of channels of the feature maps. Depthwise convolution extracts
the deep features of the feature map without changing the number of
channels. The number of channels of the output feature maps after
pointwise convolution is similar to that of the input feature maps. The
output feature maps of pointwise convolution and the input feature
maps are added point by point to obtain output feature maps of the
inverted residual block. Residual connection improves the capability of
gradients to propagate across layers and can prevent the disappearance
of gradients in deep convolutional layers. Notably, the nonlinear acti­
vation function is not used after pointwise convolution to avoid infor­
mation loss during feature map compression. As shown in Fig. 8(b), the
stride of the depthwise convolution on the feature map is 2, and the
feature maps are down-sampled while extracting deep features to
expand the receptive field of the network. However, the resolution of the
feature map is reduced after down-sampling, and the target information
is damaged.
Compared with ordinary convolution, the number of parameters and
the cost of depthwise separable convolution are relatively low. As shown
in Fig. 9, assuming that M and N are the numbers of input and output
channels, respectively, and k × k is the size of convolution kernels, the
number of parameters of ordinary convolution is k2 × M × N, and the
W. Bao et al. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 189 (2021) 106367

(a) CBAM module

(b) Channel attention submodule

(c) Spatial attention submodule

Fig. 12. CBAM module.

Fig. 13. Process flow of the method.

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Table 2 identifying the types of wheat ear diseases. The attention mechanism
Hardware and software configuration. can be used to suppress redundant background information, enhance the
Name Parameter feature representation of foreground diseases in the image, and improve
the identification performance of the model. This study introduced the
CPU Intel i7
GPU Tesla V100-PCIE-16 GB CBAM module, which combines channel and spatial attention in the
RAM 192 GB inverted residual block, to highlight the target features in the feature
System CentOS Linux map produced by depthwise convolution and improve the identification
CUDA 8.0 performance of the model. The CBAM module acts on the output feature
Keras 2.1.2
Tensorflow 1.4
map of depthwise convolution, as shown in Fig. 11.
The CBAM module contains two submodules cascaded in sequence:
the channel attention submodule and the spatial attention submodule
(Fig. 12).
Table 3 The channel attention submodule weights the channel dimensions of
Results of ablation experiments. the input feature map, highlights the feature map channel that contains
CBAM Feature fusion Accuracy F1 score Param(M) abundant disease information, and suppresses the channel that contains
Blotch Scab Health
abundant background information. Assuming that the size of input
feature map F is h × w × c, where w is the width of the feature map, h is
0.894 0.85 0.94 0.84 1.655
the height of the feature map, and c is the number of channels of the
– –
√ – 0.924 0.88 0.95 0.93 1.893
– √ 0.918 0.88 0.96 0.84 1.884 feature map, the channel attention can be expressed as
0.941 0.92 0.96 0.93 2.129
(10)
√ √
Mc (F) = σ {MLP[AvgPool(F) ] + MLP[MaxPool(F) ] },

number of parameters of depthwise separable convolution is k2 × M +
M × N. Hence, the ratio of the parameters can be calculated as
k2 × M + M × N 1 1
= + 2.
k2 × M × N N k
This study designed feature fusion modules to concatenate the output
feature maps of the 2 × 2 average pooling layer and the down-sampling
feature maps produced by the inverted residual block to make full use of
the relevant information in the feature maps and reduce the information
loss caused by down-sampling the feature maps. Shallow features were
re-injected into the deep layers of the network. The structure of the
feature fusion module is shown in Fig. 10.
In Fig. 10, the size of input feature map Xh×w×c is h × w × c. H(X) is
the feature map obtained by nonlinear transformation in the inverted
residual block, and it has a deep feature representation. H(X) can be
expressed as
H(X) = Tl {Tnl [Tnl (X) ]},
where Tl stands for linear transformation and Tnl denotes nonlinear
transformation. P(X) is the down-sampling feature map obtained
through the linear transformation of the average pooling layer, which
retains the original information in the input feature map and has a large
receptive field. P(X) can be expressed as
P(X) = Tl (X)
where AvgPool and MaxPool represent average pooling and max pool­
ing, respectively, which obtain two sets of feature vectors of size 1 × 1 ×
c. MLP stands for learnable multilayer perceptron with one hidden layer,
(6) which can output a set of learned feature vectors. σ represents the sig­
moid activation function to map each point of the feature vector be­
tween 0 and 1, and Mc (F) is the weight of different channels.
The spatial attention submodule weights the spatial position of the
input feature map, highlights the information of the region of interest in
the feature map, and suppresses other region information in the feature
map. Spatial attention can be expressed as
{ }
Ms (F) = σ f 7×7 [AvgPool(Mc ); MaxPool(Mc ) ] , (11)
where f7×7 represents a convolution kernel with a size of 7 × 7, which is
the spatial feature extractor of the target. The feature map is max pooled
and average pooled along the channel dimension. The pooled features
are concatenated to generate effective feature descriptors. The spatial
attention submodule uses the sigmoid activation function after 7 × 7
(7)
convolution to map the value of each pixel in the feature map to a
probability value of 0–1. The output of the spatial attention submodule
in the CBAM module is multiplied point by point with the input feature
map, that is, different positions in the feature map are given different
weights to enhance foreground target information and suppress back­
ground information.
(8) 2.4. Disease identification steps and process flow

Feature map Y(h/2)×(w/2)×2c, which was obtained after H(X) and P(X)
were cascaded, combines shallow and deep features. Y can be expressed
as
Y = concat[Tl {Tnl [Tnl (X) ] }; Tl (X)].
Y combines the position information of the high-resolution feature map
with the deep feature information produced by the inverted residual
block, thereby reducing the loss of disease features on the wheat ears
caused by the network during down-sampling and avoiding the bottle­
neck of feature representation. The designed feature fusion module does
not increase the amount of calculation considerably because of the use of
down-sampling and depthwise separable convolution.
2.3.3. CBAM module
Wheat ear disease images captured in natural scenes have compli­
cated backgrounds. Therefore, the spatial location information of wheat
ear disease features in the image plays an important role in accurately
The resolution and size of the obtained images are different because
the shooting devices were a digital camera and a mobile phone. The size
of the images collected in the field was adjusted to 224 × 224 × 3 to
(9) adapt to the input size of the CNN model. Then, the Retinex enhance­
ment algorithm was used to preprocess the images to reduce the influ­
ence of the uneven light of the images collected in natural scenes on the
performance of the deep learning model. The preprocessed images were
divided into training, validation, and test sets, and horizontal flip,
rotation, and translation were adopted to augment the samples in the
training and validation sets to avoid the overfitting of the model. The
augmented training images were used to train the SimpleNet model, and
the augmented validation images were used to fine tune the model
training effect during the training process. The images in the test set
were tested by the trained SimpleNet model, and the labels and confi­
dences corresponding to the predicted category of the test samples were
obtained to realize the identification of wheat ear diseases.
The specific steps of disease identification are as follows, and the
process flow of the method is shown in Fig. 13.

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(a) Original image

(b) Without the feature fusion module (c) With the feature fusion module
Fig. 14. Visualization results of the output feature maps of the convolution layer.

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Table 4 The parameters of the CNN were set as follows: the initial learning
Comparison of the identification results of different CNN models. rate was 0.01, the learning rate was reduced to 1/10 of the initial value if
Precision Recall F1 Accuracy Param the loss value of the validation set does not decrease after 10 epochs, the
score (M) batch size was 32, the number of iterations (epoch) was 200, Adam
AlexNet Blotch 0.90 0.78 0.83 0.888 58.33 optimizer was used to optimize the model, and the cross entropy was
Scab 0.93 0.98 0.95 used as the loss function.
Health 0.76 0.84 0.80
VGG16 Blotch 0.71 0.87 0.78 0.829 134.32
Scab 0.93 0.96 0.95 3.2. Evaluation indexes
Health 0.80 0.39 0.52
ResNet50 Blotch 0.85 0.80 0.82 0.882 23.59 In this study, precision, recall, F1 score, and accuracy were selected
Scab 0.87 0.98 0.92
as evaluation indexes to comprehensively evaluate the performance of
Health 1.00 0.77 0.87
InceptionV3 Blotch 0.78 0.84 0.81 0.853 21.81
deep learning algorithms:
Scab 0.90 0.95 0.92
TP
Health 0.86 0.61 0.72 Precision = , (12)
DenseNet121 Blotch 0.84 0.76 0.80 0.865 7.04 TP + FP
Scab 0.85 0.98 0.91
Health 1.00 0.74 0.85 TP
Recall = , (13)
Proposed Blotch 0.93 0.91 0.92 0.941 2.13 TP + FN
SimpleNet Scab 0.93 0.99 0.96
Health 1.00 0.87 0.93 2TP
F1score = , (14)
2TP + FP + FN

TP + TN
Table 5 Accuracy = , (15)
Comparison of the identification results of the proposed model and the Mobi­
TP + TN + FP + FN
leNet series models.
where TP is the number of true positive samples, TN is the number of
Precision Recall F1 Accuracy Param true negative samples, FP is the number of false positive samples, and FN
score (M)
is the number of false negative samples. Precision is the ratio of the
MobileNet V1 Blotch 0.82 0.84 0.83 0.888 3.23 number of correctly predicted positive samples to the number of all
Scab 0.91 0.96 0.94 predicted positive samples. Recall is the ratio of the number of correctly
Health 0.96 0.77 0.86
MobileNet V2 Blotch 0.83 0.89 0.86 0.906 2.26
predicted positive samples to the total number of true positive samples.
Scab 0.93 0.95 0.94 F1 score is an index that comprehensively considers precision and recall
Health 1.00 0.81 0.89 rates and is defined based on the harmonic mean of precision and recall
MobileNet V3- Blotch 0.85 0.93 0.89 0.918 4.24 rates. Accuracy is the ratio of the number of samples correctly predicted
Large Scab 0.94 0.99 0.97
to the total number of test samples and reflects the overall performance
Health 1.00 0.71 0.83
MobileNet V3- Blotch 0.82 0.89 0.85 0.894 1.68 of the model.
Small Scab 0.94 0.98 0.96
Health 0.91 0.68 0.78
3.3. Ablation experiment
Proposed Blotch 0.93 0.91 0.92 0.941 2.13
SimpleNet Scab 0.93 0.99 0.96
Health 1.00 0.87 0.93 Ablation experiments were performed on the proposed model, and
the results are shown in Table 3. The identification accuracy of the
model without the CBAM module and feature fusion module was 89.4%.
1. The size of the images collected in the field is cropped and resized to
The introduction of the CBAM module increased the identification ac­
224 × 224 × 3.
curacy of the model to 92.4% and improved the F1 scores of each type of
2. Retinex algorithm is used to preprocess the images.
wheat ear diseases, especially wheat glume blotch, and healthy wheat
3. The preprocessed images are divided into training set, validation set,
ear. The identification accuracy of the model after adopting the feature
and test set according to the ratio, 6:1:3.
fusion module was 91.8%. The model can better extract the image fea­
4. The number of training and validation images was expanded by
tures of wheat ear diseases using the CBAM and feature fusion modules.
horizontal flip, rotation, and translation.
The identification accuracy of the proposed model reached 94.1%,
5. The augmented training images are used to train the SimpleNet
which was 4% higher than that of the benchmark model. After the
model, and the augmented validation images are used to fine tune
introduction of the CBAM module and the feature fusion module, the
the model.
number of model parameters increased to 2.129 M, which was still lesser
6. The Loss value of the validation set is observed. The model is saved
than those of lightweight CNN models, such as MobileNet V1, V2, and
when the Loss value reaches the minimum value.
V3-Large.
7. The images in the test set are tested by the trained SimpleNet model.
Fig. 14 shows some of the visualization results of the output feature
8. The labels and confidences corresponding to the predicted category
map of the convolution layer with and without the feature fusion
of the test images are obtained to realize the identification of wheat
module. The figure shows that the model extracts image feature infor­
ear diseases.
mation, such as texture, edge, and color, in the shallower layer. The
visual information of the image in the feature map decreases and ab­
3. Experimental results and analysis
stract information increases as the convolution layers deepen. In Fig. 14
(b) and (c), the 4th and 6th convolution layers can extract the texture
3.1. Experimental configuration and hyperparameter setting
and color features of wheat ears. In the 11th convolution layer, the
localization information in the shallow feature map and the deep se­
The experiments used Python as the programming language, Keras as
mantic information are fused by adding a feature fusion module, which
the deep learning framework, and Tensorflow as the backend and were
reduces the loss of disease feature information during the down-
run on the high-performance computing platform of Anhui University.
sampling process and makes the features of the region of interest more
The hardware and software configurations are shown in Table 2.
prominent.

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W. Bao et al. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 189 (2021) 106367

(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

Fig. 15. Visualization results of different models: (a) original images, (b) AlexNet, (c) MobileNet V3-Small, (d) MobileNet V3-Large, and (e) SimpleNet.

which turns to withered white in later stages. The backgrounds are

Table 6 complicated because the images were taken in natural scenes; this
Identification results of different backbones with CBAM and feature fusion problem increases the difficulty of accurately identifying wheat glume
modules.
blotch. In terms of parameters, the classical CNNs have a large number
Model Accuracy F1 score Number of of parameters. The structure of the proposed model is simple, and the
Param(M)
Blotch Scab Health inverted residual blocks used are composed of depthwise separable
AlexNet 0.888 0.83 0.95 0.80 58.33
convolution, which reduces the number of parameters. Thus, SimpleNet
AlexNet + CBAM 0.912 0.88 0.96 0.84 58.39 is a lightweight CNN model, which has high identification accuracy for
MobileNet V3-Small 0.894 0.85 0.96 0.78 1.68 wheat ear diseases.
MobileNet V3-Small + 0.906 0.86 0.96 0.83 1.72
Feature fusion
MobileNet V3-Large 0.918 0.89 0.97 0.83 4.24 3.5. Comparison of identification results with lightweight CNN models of
MobileNet V3-Large + 0.924 0.89 0.97 0.85 4.36
Feature fusion
MobileNet series
Proposed SimpleNet 0.941 0.92 0.96 0.93 2.13
The proposed model SimpleNet was compared with lightweight CNN
models, namely, the MobileNet series, and the identification results are
3.4. Comparison of identification results with classical CNN models shown in Table 5. Introducing the CBAM module and feature fusion
module to SimpleNet the identification effect, that is, the proposed
In this experiment, classical CNN models, namely, AlexNet (Kriz­ model had better identification performance than MobileNet V1
hevsky et al, 2017), VGG16 (Simonyan and Zisserman, 2014), ResNet50 (Howard et al.,2017), V2(Sandler et al.,2018), and V3(Howard
(He et al, 2016), InceptionV3 (Szegedy et al, 2016), and DenseNet121 et al.,2019). MobileNet series models had relatively low recall values for
(Huang et al,2017), were compared with the proposed model, Simple­ healthy wheat ears and may mistake the backgrounds as targets of in­
Net. The identification results of different CNN models are shown in terest. The recall value of the proposed model for healthy wheat ears was
Table 4. The identification results of the proposed model for wheat scab higher than that of the MobileNet series models, which indicates that
were better than those for wheat glume blotch and healthy wheat ears. attention mechanism can improve the performance of the model. The
The reason is that compared with wheat glume blotch, the characteris­ number of parameters of the proposed model is 2.13 M, which is less
tics of wheat scab are more obvious in the image. The symptoms of than those of the lightweight models, such as MobileNet V1, V2, and V3-
wheat glume blotch are mostly brown spots on wheat glume husks, Large. Compared with MobileNet V3-Small, the identification accuracy

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W. Bao et al. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 189 (2021) 106367

(a) SE module (b) CBAM module

Fig. 16. Confusion matrix of the identification results of different attention mechanisms.

Fig. 17. Comparison of visualization results of SE module and CBAM module.

of the proposed model improved by 4.7% on the premise of adding a these modules were added to other backbone network models, such as
small number of parameters. AlexNet, MobileNet V3-Large, and MobileNet V3-Small. The network
models achieved good performance in the previous comparative ex­
periments. Given that AlexNet has no inverted residual blocks, only the
3.6. Effectiveness of CBAM module and feature fusion module to other
CBAM module was added to it. SE channel attention modules (Hu et al.,
backbones
2018) are already used in MobileNet V3, so the experiments only added
feature fusion module to MobileNet V3. The identification results of
The experimental results showed that compared with the benchmark
AlexNet, AlexNet + CBAM, MobileNet V3, and MobileNet V3 + Feature
CNN models, such as AlexNet, VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, and
fusion are shown in Table 6. After adding the CBAM module to AlexNet,
DenseNet121, and the lightweight CNN models of the MobileNet series,
the identification accuracy of the model improved by 2.4%, and the
the proposed SimpleNet model performs the best in the identification of
number of parameters increased by only 0.06 M. After adding the
wheat ear disease images with complex backgrounds. Grad-CAM (Sel­
feature fusion module to MobileNet V3-Small, the identification accu­
varaju et al., 2020) was used to display the visualization results of the
racy of the model improved by 1.2%, and the number of parameters
different models. The visualization results of the superposition of the
increased by only 0.04 M. The identification accuracy of MobileNet V3-
wheat ear images and their heatmaps are shown in Fig. 15. As presented
Large with the feature fusion module obtained a 0.6% improvement.
by the first two rows of the figure, the heatmaps of AlexNet and Mobi­
The feature fusion module in the proposed model concatenated the
leNet V3 highlight the land in the backgrounds. The straws in the last
output feature maps to make full use of the relevant information and
two rows of images are also highlighted by AlexNet and MobileNet V3.
reduce the information loss caused by down-sampling. The CBAM
However, the proposed SimpleNet model can accurately focus on the
module in the proposed model combines channel and spatial attention to
ears of wheat plants and pays minimal attention to irrelevant complex
highlight the disease features and suppress the background information
backgrounds, thus obtaining higher disease identification accuracy than
in the feature maps. Thus, the proposed model is more accurate in the
the other models.
identification of wheat ear diseases in images with complex
To verify the effectiveness of the CBAM and feature fusion modules,

13
W. Bao et al.
backgrounds. The identification result of the proposed SimpleNet is
better than those of the other backbone network models with the CBAM
or the feature fusion module.
3.7. Comparison of different attention mechanisms
The CBAM attention module used in the proposed model was
compared with the SE channel attention module. The confusion matrixes
of the identification results are shown in Fig. 16. Fig. 16 shows that the
proposed model using the CBAM module has higher identification ac­
curacy for each type of wheat ear diseases than the model with the SE
module, especially for wheat glume blotch, whose image features are not
obvious. This result shows that introducing CBAM attention module can
make the model better find the diseased region in the image and reduce
the influence of backgrounds on the identification results.
Grad-CAM was used to display the visualized results of the output
feature maps of the SE and CBAM modules (Fig. 17). The background in
Fig. 17(a–c) is relatively simple; hence, the background had little in­
fluence on the identification results. Both models gave correct identifi­
cation results with high confidence. Fig. 17(c) shows that the CBAM
module was more focused on the diseased region. Fig. 17(d) has a
complicated background. The SE module did not pay attention to the
region of interest in the image, and the identification result was wrong.
In comparison, the CBAM module focused on the region of interest, and
the model gave the correct identification result. Fig. 17(e) shows healthy
wheat ears. The result given by the SE module was the highest proba­
bility of glume blotch (61.19%), whereas the result given by the CBAM
module was the highest probability of healthy wheat ears (65.01%). The
results show that combining the CBAM attention module can make the
model better find the diseased region in the image and reduce the in­
fluence of the background on the identification effect.
4. Conclusion
The images of diseased wheat ears captured in natural scenes in the
field have complicated backgrounds. Existing CNN models have high
identification accuracy but have many parameters and high computa­
tional cost. This study designed a lightweight CNN model, SimpleNet,
which can be used for the automatic identification of wheat ear diseases,
such as glume blotch and scab, in natural scene images. SimpleNet uses
inverted residual block as the main module to construct the network,
and it reduces the number of model parameters and computational cost.
The combination of inverted residual block and the CBAM module en­
hances the model’s ability to represent disease features in images with
complex backgrounds and pay better attention to disease information;
therefore, the identification accuracy of the model is improved. In
addition, SimpleNet uses the feature fusion module to fuse shallow and
deep features to reduce the loss of disease features during the down-
sampling process.
In the experiments, the proposed model was compared with light­
weight and classical CNN models. The proposed model achieved an
accuracy of 0.941, which is 5.7% higher than that of AlexNet with the
highest accuracy among the classical CNN models and 2.3% higher than
that of MobileNetV3-Large with the highest accuracy among the Mobi­
leNet series.
The proposed model has only 2.13 M parameters, which is similar to
the number of parameters of the MobileNet series models. The proposed
model can be transplanted to mobile devices to assist farmers in iden­
tifying wheat ear diseases accurately.
However, the initial symptoms of wheat ear infection with fungal
diseases are very mild, and the model usually experiences difficulty
extracting the information of the diseased region. In addition, the pro­
posed method only uses images of winter wheat ears, which is a data
limitation of this study. Future research should focus on collecting more
wheat ear image data under different natural scenes and at the initial
stage of fungal infection. Images of wheat leaf diseases and other
14
Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 189 (2021) 106367
seasonal wheat ear images will be collected in the future to further verify
the proposed model.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Wenxia Bao: Investigation, Conceptualization, Data curation, Soft­
ware, Writing-original draft, Writing – review & editing. Xinghua Yang:
Writing–original draft, Software, Conceptualization, Methodology,
Validation. Dong Liang: Conceptualization, Supervision, Formal anal­
ysis. Gensheng Hu: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing,
Data curation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition,
Project administration. Xianjun Yang: Formal analysis, Supervision.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the Major Natural Science Research Projects in
Colleges and Universities of Anhui Province, China under Grant
KJ2020ZD03 and the Open Research Fund of National Engineering
Research Center for Agro-Ecological Big Data Analysis & Application of
Anhui University, China under Grant (AE201902) for their support.
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