Dual-branch network enhances plant disease detection for enhanced crop protection

A research team has developed LGNet, a dual-branch network that combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and visual transformers (VTs) for plant disease identification. LGNet effectively fuses local and global features, achieving state-of-the-art recognition accuracies of 88.74% on the AI Challenger 2018 dataset and 99.08% on the self-collected corn disease dataset.