Imperfect Wheat Grain Recognition Combined with an Attention Mechanism and Residual Network

Intelligent detection of imperfect wheat grains based on machine vision is of great significance to correctly and rapidly evaluate wheat quality. There is little difference between the partial characteristics of imperfect and perfect wheat grains, which is a key factor limiting the classification and recognition accuracy of imperfect wheat based on a deep learning network model. In this paper, we propose a method for imperfect wheat grains recognition combined with an attention mechanism and residual network (ResNet), and verify its recognition accuracy by adding an attention mechanism module into different depths of residual network. Five residual networks with different depths (18, 34, 50, 101, and 152) were selected for the experiment, it was found that the recognition accuracy of each network model was improved with the attention mechanism, and the average recognition rate of ResNet-50 with the addition of the attention mechanism reached 96.5%. For ResNet-50 with the attention mechanism, the optimal learning rate was further screened as 0.0003. The average recognition accuracy reached 97.5%, among which the recognition rates of scab wheat grains, insect-damaged wheat grains, sprouted wheat grains, mildew wheat grains, broken wheat grains, and perfect wheat grains reached 97%, 99%, 99%, 95%, 96%, and 99% respectively. This work can provide guidance for the detection and recognition of imperfect wheat grains using machine vision.