Abstract
Accurate recognition of pest categories is crucial for effective pest control. Due to issues such as the large variation in pest appearance, low data quality, and complex real-world environments, pest recognition poses challenges in practical applications. At present, many models have made great efforts on the real scene dataset IP102, but the highest recognition accuracy is only 75%. To improve pest recognition in practice, this paper proposes a multi-image fusion recognition method. Considering that farmers have easy access to data, the method performs fusion recognition on multiple images of the same pest instead of the conventional single image. Specifically, the method first uses convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract feature maps from these images. Then, an effective feature localization module (EFLM) captures the feature maps outputted by all blocks of the last convolutional stage of the CNN, marks the regions with large activation values as pest locations, and then integrates and crops them to obtain the localized features. Next, the adaptive filtering fusion module (AFFM) learns gate masks and selection masks for these features to eliminate interference from useless information, and uses the attention mechanism to select beneficial features for fusion. Finally, the classifier categorizes the fused features and the soft voting (SV) module integrates these results to obtain the final pest category. The principle of the model is activation value localization, feature filtering and fusion, and voting integration. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can train high-performance feature extractors and classifiers, achieving recognition accuracy of 73.9%, 99.8%, and 99.7% on IP102, D0, and ETP, respectively, surpassing most single models. The results also show that thanks to the positive role of each module, the accuracy of multi-image fusion recognition reaches the state-of-the-art level of 96.1%, 100%, and 100% on IP102, D0, and ETP using 5, 2, and 2 images, respectively, which meets the requirements of practical applications. Additionally, we have developed a web application that applies our research findings in practice to assist farmers in reliable pest identification and drive the advancement of smart agriculture.