BLSENet: A Novel Lightweight Bilinear Convolutional Neural Network Based on Attention Mechanism and Feature Fusion Strategy for Apple Leaf Disease Classification

Accurate identification of apple leaf diseases is of great significance for improving apple yield. The lesion area of the apple leaf disease image is small and vulnerable to background interference, which easily leads to low recognition accuracy. To solve this problem, a lightweight bilinear convolutional neural network (CNN) model named BLSENet based on attention mechanism is designed. The model consists of two subnetworks, and each subnetwork is embedded with a Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) module. By using the feature extraction ability of the two subnetworks and combining the bilinear feature CONCAT operation, the multiscale features of the image are obtained. Compared with the unimproved model LeNet-5 (84.63%), BLSENet has higher accuracy in the test set, which indicates that SE module and bilinear feature fusion have a positive effect on the performance of the model, and BLSENet has the ability to identify apple leaf diseases. The model has achieved the expected goal and can provide technical support for accurate identification and real-time monitoring of apple disease images.