Cassava disease detection using a lightweight modified soft attention network

Abstract BACKGROUND Cassava is a high‐carbohydrate crop that is at risk of viral infections. The production rate and quality of cassava crops are affected by several diseases. However, the manual identification of diseases is challenging and requires considerable time because of the lack of field professionals and the limited availability of clear and distinct information. Consequently, the agricultural management system is seeking an efficient and lightweight method that can be deployable to edged devices for detecting diseases at an early stage. To address these issues and accurately categorize different diseases, a very effective and lightweight framework called CDDNet has been introduced. We used MobileNetV3Small framework as a backbone feature for extracting optimized, discriminating, and distinct features. These features are empirically validated at the early intermediate stage. Additionally, we modified the soft attention module to effectively prioritize the diseased regions and enhance significant cassava plant disease‐related features for efficient cassava disease detection. RESULTS Our proposed method achieved accuracies of 98.95%, 97.03%, and 98.25% on Cassava Image Dataset, Cassava Plant Disease Merged (2019–2020) Dataset, and the newly created Cassava Plant Composite Dataset, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed technique outperforms previous state‐of‐the‐art methods in terms of accuracy, parameter count, and frames per second values, ultimately making the proposed CDDNet the best one for real‐time processing. CONCLUSION Our findings underscore the importance of a lightweight and efficient technique for cassava disease detection and classification in a real‐time environment. Furthermore, we highlight the impact of modified soft attention on model performance. © 2024 The Author(s). Pest Management Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.