Diagnosis of Cotton Nitrogen Nutrient Levels Using Ensemble MobileNetV2FC, ResNet101FC, and DenseNet121FC

Nitrogen plays a crucial role in cotton growth, making the precise diagnosis of its nutrition levels vital for the scientific and rational application of fertilizers. Addressing this need, our study introduced an EMRDFC-based diagnosis model specifically for cotton nitrogen nutrition levels. In our field experiments, cotton was subjected to five different nitrogen application rates. To enhance the diagnostic capabilities of our model, we employed ResNet101, MobileNetV2, and DenseNet121 as base models and integrated the CBAM (Convolutional Block Attention Module) into each to improve their ability to differentiate among various nitrogen levels. Additionally, the Focal loss function was introduced to address issues of data imbalance. The model’s effectiveness was further augmented by employing integration strategies such as relative majority voting, simple averaging, and weighted averaging. Our experimental results indicated significant accuracy improvements in the enhanced ResNet101, MobileNetV2, and DenseNet121 models by 2.3%, 2.91%, and 2.93%, respectively. Notably, the integration of these models consistently improved accuracy, with gains of 0.87% and 1.73% compared to the highest-performing single model, DenseNet121FC. The optimal ensemble model, which utilized the weighted average method, demonstrated superior learning and generalization capabilities. The proposed EMRDFC model shows great promise in precisely identifying cotton nitrogen status, offering critical insights into the diagnosis of crop nutrient status. This research contributes significantly to the field of agricultural technology by providing a reliable tool for nitrogen-level assessment in cotton cultivation.