ShuffleNetV2 SSM MLCA: a lightweight recognition network for wheat fungal diseases.

Introduction: Wheat is one of the most widely planted staple crops worldwide and underpins global food security. Fungal diseases severely threaten wheat growth and trigger massive yield losses during cultivation. Traditional manual diagnosis is time-consuming and highly subjective, while existing deep learning models often struggle to achieve high accuracy and robustness in complex field environments. Accurate identification of these fungal diseases is therefore vital to secure grain production. Methods: This paper constructs a lightweight convolutional neural network named ShuffleNetV2_SSM_MLCA for wheat fungal disease classification. First, the original basic blocks of ShuffleNetV2 are substituted with SS-Conv-SSM modules to strengthen the extraction of fine-grained lesion features amid visually analogous fungal disease samples; half convolution is embedded to cut down model computational overhead. Second, a Mixed Local Channel Attention (MLCA) unit is attached to the convolution branch of each SS-Conv-SSM module, which adaptively highlights discriminative disease features and filters irrelevant background noise. Standard training configurations and five-fold cross-validation are adopted for fair model evaluation. Results: Comparative experiments reveal that the presented network reaches a classification accuracy of 91.35%, which surpasses the original ShuffleNetV2 baseline by 1.16 percentage points. Controlled ablation tests verify the independent performance gain of each core component: the SS-Conv-SSM module raises overall accuracy by 0.89%, and the MLCA mechanism brings an extra 0.27% accuracy increment. Discussion: The proposed ShuffleNetV2_SSM_MLCA architecture strikes a favorable trade-off between model lightweight property and classification performance. It delivers a low-computation, high-precision recognition scheme for wheat fungal diseases and lays a solid technical foundation for real-time disease monitoring in intelligent agricultural scenarios.