MFFSNet: A Lightweight Multi-Scale Shuffle CNN Network for Wheat Disease Identification in Complex Contexts

Wheat is one of the most essential food crops globally, but diseases significantly threaten its yield and quality, resulting in considerable economic losses. The identification of wheat diseases faces challenges, such as interference from complex environments in the field, the inefficiency of traditional machine learning methods, and difficulty in deploying the existing deep learning models. To address these challenges, this study proposes a multi-scale feature fusion shuffle network model (MFFSNet) for wheat disease identification from complex environments in the field. MFFSNet incorporates a multi-scale feature extraction and fusion module (MFEF), utilizing inflated convolution to efficiently capture diverse features, and its main constituent units are improved by ShuffleNetV2 units. A dual-branch shuffle attention mechanism (DSA) is also integrated to enhance the model’s focus on critical features, reducing interference from complex backgrounds. The model is characterized by its smaller size and fast operation speed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DSA attention mechanism outperforms the best-performing Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) block by approximately 1% in accuracy, with the final model achieving 97.38% accuracy and 97.96% recall on the test set, which are higher than classical models such as GoogleNet, MobileNetV3, and Swin Transformer. In addition, the number of parameters of this model is only 0.45 M, one-third that of MobileNetV3 Small, which is very suitable for deploying on devices with limited memory resources, demonstrating great potential for practical applications in agricultural production. © 2025 by the authors.