ResdenseNet: a lightweight dense ResNet enhanced with depthwise separable convolutions and its applications for early plant disease classification
摘要
In recent years, artificial intelligence has undergone robust development, leading to the emergence of numerous autonomous AI applications. However, a crucial challenge lies in optimizing computational efficiency and reducing training time while maintaining high accuracy with limited hardware resources. This paper introduces ResdenseNet, a model built upon the MobileNet, DenseNet, and ResNet architectures. ResdenseNet combines dense blocks and residual blocks from the DenseNet and ResNet architectures. In these dense blocks, the standard convolutional units are replaced by depthwise separable convolutional units, a significant part of the MobileNet architecture. The experimental outcomes are contrasted with established models and their iterations, including ResNet-50, ResNet-101, MobileNet-V1, MobileNet-V2, DenseNet-121, and DenseNet-169. The proposed model is tested on benchmark and proposed datasets, showcasing its efficiency in reducing computations and accelerating the training process. Emphasizing hyperparameter importance, ResdenseNet, optimized with a growth rate of 64, 6 layers, and ReLU activation, achieves an accuracy of (98.73%) and a F1-score of (98.20%) on the wheat and barley dataset. The results indicate that ResdenseNet significantly decreases the number of parameters to 0.72M and efficiently shortens training time to 5983.54 s. Particularly noteworthy is ResdenseNet’s superiority over other models in terms of having the fewest parameters, the shortest training time, and the highest accuracy, especially when dealing with wheat, barley, and maize datasets.