DenseSwinV2: Channel Attentive Dual Branch CNN Transformer Learning for Cassava Leaf Disease Classification

TL;DR

This paper introduces DenseSwinV2, a hybrid CNN-Transformer model that effectively classifies cassava leaf diseases by combining local and global feature extraction, achieving high accuracy on a large dataset.

Contribution

The novel DenseSwinV2 framework integrates DenseNet and SwinV2 with attention modules, improving disease classification accuracy over existing models.

Findings

Achieved 98.02% classification accuracy on cassava disease dataset.

Outperformed established CNN and transformer models in accuracy and robustness.

Demonstrated effectiveness in real-world conditions with occlusion and noise.

Abstract

This work presents a new Hybrid Dense SwinV2, a two-branch framework that jointly leverages densely connected convolutional features and hierarchical customized Swin Transformer V2 (SwinV2) representations for cassava disease classification. The proposed framework captures high resolution local features through its DenseNet branch, preserving the fine structural cues and also allowing for effective gradient flow. Concurrently, the customized SwinV2 models global contextual dependencies through the idea of shifted-window self attention, which enables the capture of long range interactions critical in distinguishing between visually similar lesions. Moreover, an attention channel-squeeze module is employed for each CNN Transformer stream independently to emphasize discriminative disease related responses and suppress redundant or background driven activations. Finally, these discriminative channels are fused to achieve refined representations from the dense local and SwinV2 global correlated strengthened feature maps, respectively. The proposed Dense SwinV2 utilized a public cassava leaf disease dataset of 31000 images, comprised of five diseases, including brown streak, mosaic, green mottle, bacterial blight, and normal leaf conditions. The proposed Dense SwinV2 demonstrates a significant classification accuracy of 98.02 percent with an F1 score of 97.81 percent, outperforming well-established convolutional and transformer models. These results underline the fact that Hybrid Dense SwinV2 offers robustness and practicality in the field level diagnosis of cassava disease and real world challenges related to occlusion, noise, and complex backgrounds.