Weeds have a detrimental effect on crop yield. However, the prevailing chemical weed control methods cause pollution of the ecosystem and land. Therefore, it has become a trend to reduce dependence on herbicides; realize a sustainable, intelligent weed control method; and protect the land. In order to realize intelligent weeding, efficient and accurate crop and weed recognition is necessary. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely applied for weed and crop recognition due to their high speed and efficiency. In this paper, a multi-path input skip-residual network (SkipResNet) was put forward to upgrade the classification function of weeds and crops. It improved the residual block in the ResNet model and combined three different path selection algorithms. Experiments showed that on the plant seedling dataset, our proposed network achieved an accuracy of 95.07%, which is 0.73%, 0.37%, and 4.75% better than that of ResNet18, VGG19, and MobileNetV2, respectively. The validation results on the weed–corn dataset also showed that the algorithm can provide more accurate identification of weeds and crops, thereby reducing land contamination during the weeding process. In addition, the algorithm is generalizable and can be used in image classification in agriculture and other fields.

Land image recognition and classification and land environment detection are important research fields in remote sensing applications. Because of the diversity and complexity of different tasks of land environment recognition and classification, it is difficult for researchers to use a single model to achieve the best performance in scene classification of multiple remote sensing land images. Therefore, to determine which model is the best for the current recognition classification tasks, it is often necessary to select and experiment with many different models. However, finding the optimal model is accompanied by an increase in trial-and-error costs and is a waste of researchers’ time, and it is often impossible to find the right model quickly. To address the issue of existing models being too large for easy selection, this paper proposes a multi-path reconfigurable network structure and takes the multi-path reconfigurable residual network (MR-ResNet) model as an example. The reconfigurable neural network model allows researchers to selectively choose the required modules and reassemble them to generate customized models by splitting the trained models and connecting them through modules with different properties. At the same time, by introducing the concept of a multi-path input network, the optimal path is selected by inputting different modules, which shortens the training time of the model and allows researchers to easily find the network model suitable for the current application scenario. A lot of training data, computational resources, and model parameter experience are saved. Three public datasets, NWPU-RESISC45, RSSCN7, and SIRI-WHU datasets, were used for the experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model surpasses the classic residual network (ResNet) in terms of both parameters and performance.