MAIANet: Signal modulation in cassava leaf disease classification

Cassava is the third largest source of carbohydrates for human consumption worldwide; however, it is highly susceptible to viral and bacterial diseases, which pose a significant threat to food security. The advancement of deep learning algorithms in precision agriculture holds the key to enabling the early classification of plant diseases, thereby leading to enhanced crop yields and ultimately stabilizing food security. In the coarse-grained label discrimination task of weak supervision learning, high-quality semantic features contain abundant semantic description information, which plays a crucial role in constructing a precise description of plant disease discrimination in tanglesome field circumstances and directly influences the performance of neural networks. Thus, a multiattention IBN anti-aliasing neural network (MAIANet) was proposed to improve the classification accuracy of cassava leaf disease classification by improving the feature quality in the coarseness label classification task. The proposed MAIANet neural network includes two innovative approaches. First, the multiattention method was designed to scale the feature signals twice to adjust the angular frequency of the feature signals in the residual branch for optimal feature fitting within the residual unit. Second, the anti-aliasing block extracts the high-frequency component feature and optimizes the quantization result of the pooling operation to depress the aliasing signal in the down-sampled feature maps. When the proposed method was tested and validated on the cassava dataset, the results showed that the prediction accuracy of the proposed method significantly improved, with an accuracy of 95.83 %, a loss of 1.720, and an F1-score of 0.9585, outperforming V2-ResNet-101, EfficientNet-B5, RepVGG-B3g4, and AlexNet with significant margins. Based on the above experimental results, the proposed algorithm is suitable for classifying cassava leaf diseases.