MSFANet: a multi-scale feature aggregation network for tobacco pest recognition

Abstract

Tobacco is a globally significant economic crop, and pest infestation represents one of the primary factors contributing to declines in both yield and quality. However, tobacco pests encompass a wide variety of species that differ substantially in morphology and scale. Field-captured images are frequently subject to complex background interference and class imbalance, presenting considerable challenges for automated recognition. Existing deep learning approaches remain limited in their capacity for multi-scale feature extraction and discriminative feature representation under such conditions. To address these challenges, this study proposes a Multi-Scale Feature Aggregation Network (MSFANet) for tobacco pest recognition, formulated here as a single-label image classification task. To address scale variation and complex field backgrounds, two task-oriented modules were developed. The Multi-Scale Pyramid Pooling (MSPP) module aggregates contextual information across multiple receptive fields through parallel feature extraction and adaptive cross-branch fusion. The Hierarchical Feature Fusion Block (HFFB) subsequently refines the feature representations through spatial gating and partial convolution. An auxiliary classification head and Focal Loss were incorporated during training to provide intermediate supervision and address class imbalance, respectively. The effectiveness of MSFANet was evaluated on a dataset comprising 13 tobacco-associated pest and natural-enemy categories. The model achieved accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score of 97.63%, 97.89%, 97.59%, and 97.71%, respectively, with a parameter count of 1.21 M. Among the models trained from random initialization, MSFANet shared the highest accuracy while using the fewest parameters. By combining multi-scale contextual aggregation with hierarchical feature refinement, MSFANet achieved accurate classification across the 13 tobacco-associated categories under complex field conditions. The proposed method provides effective technical support for automated and precision-oriented pest monitoring in tobacco fields, offering practical value for advancing precise pest management and the broader development of smart agriculture.