EResNet‐SVM: an overfitting‐relieved deep learning model for recognition of plant diseases and pests

Abstract BACKGROUND The accurate recognition and early warning for plant diseases and pests are a prerequisite of intelligent prevention and control for plant diseases and pests. As a result of the phenotype similarity of the hazarded plant after plant diseases and pests occur, as well as the interference of the external environment, traditional deep learning models often face the overfitting problem in phenotype recognition of plant diseases and pests, which leads to not only the slow convergence speed of the network, but also low recognition accuracy. RESULTS Motivated by the above problems, the present study proposes a deep learning model EResNet‐support vector machine (SVM) to alleviate the overfitting for the recognition and classification of plant diseases and pests. First, the feature extraction capability of the model is improved by increasing feature extraction layers in the convolutional neural network. Second, the order‐reduced modules are embedded and a sparsely activated function is introduced to reduce model complexity and alleviate overfitting. Finally, a classifier fused by SVM and fully connected layers are introduced to transforms the original non‐linear classification problem into a linear classification problem in high‐dimensional space to further alleviate the overfitting and improve the recognition accuracy of plant diseases and pests. The ablation experiments further demonstrate that the fused structure can effectively alleviate the overfitting and improve the recognition accuracy. The experimental recognition results for typical plant diseases and pests show that the proposed EResNet‐SVM model has 99.30% test accuracy for eight conditions (seven plant diseases and one normal), which is 5.90% higher than the original ResNet18. Compared with the classic AlexNet, GoogLeNet, Xception, SqueezeNet and DenseNet201 models, the accuracy of the EResNet‐SVM model has improved by 5.10%, 7%, 8.10%, 6.20% and 1.90%, respectively. The testing accuracy of the EResNet‐SVM model for 6 insect pests is 100%, which is 3.90% higher than that of the original ResNet18 model. CONCLUSION This research provides not only useful references for alleviating the overfitting problem in deep learning, but also a theoretical and technical support for the intelligent detection and control of plant diseases and pests. © 2024 Society of Chemical Industry.