Soybean Lodging Grade Classification Based on UAV Remote Sensing and Improved AlexNet Model

Soybean lodging severely impairs yield and quality, and its precise grading is a key prerequisite for intelligent agricultural management and loss assessment in agricultural insurance. Most existing studies have focused primarily on soybean lodging identification and lodging resistance evaluation, whereas methods for the precise differentiation of lodging grades remain to be refined. This study presents an improved AlexNet model integrated with a Local Feature Aggregation (LFA) attention mechanism and a dynamic optimization strategy for the accurate grading of soybean lodging. RGB imagery of soybean canopies during the grain-filling to early maturity stages was acquired via a multispectral unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). A dynamic Dropout strategy was adopted to enhance model stability and mitigate overfitting, and the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm was employed to intelligently optimize key hyperparameters of the model. The results demonstrate that the optimized model achieved an overall accuracy of 94.23% on the test set, with an average loss of 0.0682 and an inference speed of 0.422 s/step. In independent field validation, the grading accuracies for the five lodging grades were 90.12%, 86.35%, 89.47%, 88.93%, and 92.76%, respectively, with a mean accuracy of 89.53%. The proposed model enables the rapid and precise grading of soybean lodging under field conditions, thereby providing effective technical support for intelligent field management and disaster loss assessment in soybean production.