Optimized lightweight CA-transformer: Using transformer for fine-grained visual categorization

As a rapidly developing research direction in computer vision (CV), related algorithms such as image classification and object detection have achieved inevitable research progress. Improving the accuracy and efficiency of algorithms for fine-grained identification of plant diseases and birds in agriculture is essential to the dynamic monitoring of agricultural environments. In this study, based on the computer vision detection and classification algorithm, combined with the architecture and ideas of the CNN model, the mainstream Transformer model was optimized, and then the CA-Transformer (Transformer Combined with Channel Attention) model was proposed to improve the ability to identify and classify critical areas. The main work is as follows: (1) The C-Attention mechanism is proposed to strengthen the feature information extraction within the patch and the communication between feature information so that the entire network can be fully attentive while reducing the computational overhead; (2) The weight-sharing method is proposed to transfer parameters between different layers, improve the reusability of model data, and at the same time increase the knowledge distillation link to reduce problems such as excessive parameters and overfitting; (3) Token Labeling is proposed to generate score labels according to the position of each Token, and the total loss function of this study is proposed according to the CA-Transformer model structure. The performance of the CA-Transformer model proposed in this study is compared with the current mainstream models on datasets of different scales, and ablation experiments are performed. The results show that the accuracy and mIoU of the CA-Transformer proposed in this study reach 82.89% and 53.17MS, respectively, and have good transfer learning ability, indicating that the model has good performance in fine-grained visual categorization tasks and can be used in ecological information. In the context of more diverse ecological information, this study can provide reference and inspiration for the practical application of information.