Zero-exemplar deep continual learning for crop disease recognition: a study of total variation attention regularization in vision transformers

Abstract

With the increasing integration of AI technology in the food industry, deep learning has demonstrated its immense potential in the domain of plant disease image recognition. However, there remains a gap in research between models capable of continual learning of new diseases and addressing the inherent catastrophic forgetting issue in neural networks. This study aims to comprehensively evaluate various learning strategies based on advanced computer vision models for multi-disease continual learning tasks in food disease recognition. To cater to the benchmark dataset requirements, we collected the PlantDiseaseCL dataset, sourced from the internet, encompassing diverse crop diseases from apples, corn, and more. Utilizing the Vision Transformer (ViT) model, we established a plant disease image recognition classifier, which, in joint learning, outperformed several comparative CNN architectures in accuracy (0.9538), precision (0.9532), recall (0.9528), and F1 score (0.9560). To further harness the potential of ViT in food disease defect recognition, we introduced a mathematical paradigm for crop disease recognition continual learning. For the first time, we proposed a novel ViT-TV architecture in the multi-disease image recognition scenario, incorporating a Total Variation (TV) distance-based loss (TV-Loss) to quantify the disparity between current and previous attention distributions, fostering attention consistency and mitigating the catastrophic forgetting inherent in ViT without prior task samples. In the incremental learning of the PlantDiseaseCL dataset across 3-Steps and 5-Steps, our strategy achieved average accuracies of 0.7077 and 0.5661, respectively, surpassing all compared Zero-Exemplar Approaches like LUCIR, SI, MAS, and even outperforming exemplar-based strategies like EEIL and ICaRL. In conclusion, the ViT-TV approach offers robust support for the long-term intelligent development of the agricultural and food industry, especially showcasing significant applicability in continual learning for crop disease image recognition.