Activation functions facilitate deep neural networks by introducing non-linearity to the learning process. The non-linearity feature gives the neural network the ability to learn complex patterns. Recently, the most widely used activation function is the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU). Though, other various existing activation including hand-designed alternatives to ReLU have been proposed. However, none has succeeded in replacing ReLU due to their existing inconsistencies. In this work, activation function called ReLU-Memristor-like Activation Function (RMAF) is proposed to leverage benefits of negative values in neural networks. RMAF introduces a constant parameter (α) and a threshold parameter (p) making the function smooth, non-monotonous, and introduces non-linearity in the network. Our experiments show that, the RMAF works better than ReLU and other activation functions on deeper models and across number of challenging datasets. Firstly, experiments are performed by training and classifying on multilayer perceptron (MLP) over benchmark data such as the Wisconsin breast cancer, MNIST, Iris and Car evaluation. RMAF achieves high performance of 98.74%, 99.67%, 98.81% and 99.42% respectively, compared to Sigmoid, Tanh and ReLU. Secondly, experiments were performed on convolution neural network (ResNet) over MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 data and observed the proposed activation function achieves higher performance accuracy of 99.73%, 98.77% and 79.82% respectively than Tanh, ReLU and Swish. Additionally, we experimented our work on deep networks i.e. squeeze network (SqueezeNet), Dense connected neural network (DenseNet121) and ImageNet dataset, which RMAF produced the best performance. We note that, the RMAF converges faster than the other functions and can replace ReLU in any neural network due to the efficiency, scalability and its similarity to both ReLU and Swish.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been evident in the agricultural sector recently. The objective of AI in agriculture is to control crop pests/diseases, reduce cost, and improve crop yield. In developing countries, the agriculture sector faces numerous challenges in the form of knowledge gap between farmers and technology, disease and pest infestation, lack of storage facilities, among others. In order to resolve some of these challenges, this paper presents crop pests/disease datasets sourced from local farms in Ghana. The dataset is presented in two folds; the raw images which consists of 24,881 images (6,549-Cashew, 7,508-Cassava, 5,389-Maize, and 5,435-Tomato) and augmented images which is further split into train and test sets. The latter consists of 102,976 images (25,811-Cashew, 26,330-Cassava, 23,657-Maize, and 27,178-Tomato), categorized into 22 classes. All images are de-identified, validated by expert plant virologists, and freely available for use by the research community.

This article is concerned with the exponential synchronization of coupled memristive neural networks (CMNNs) with multiple mismatched parameters and topology-based probability impulsive mechanism (TPIM) on time scales. To begin with, a novel model is designed by taking into account three types of mismatched parameters, including: 1) mismatched dimensions; 2) mismatched connection weights; and 3) mismatched time-varying delays. Then, the method of auxiliary-state variables is adopted to deal with the novel model, which implies that the presented novel model can not only use any isolated system (regard as a node) in the coupled system to synchronize the states of CMNNs but also can use an external node, that is, not affiliated to the coupled system to synchronize the states of CMNNs. Moreover, the TPIM is first proposed to efficiently schedule information transmission over the network, possibly subject to a series of nonideal factors. The novel control protocol is more robust against these nonideal factors than the traditional impulsive control mechanism. By means of the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional, robust analysis approach, and some inequality processing techniques, exponential synchronization conditions unifying the continuous-time and discrete-time systems are derived on the framework of time scales. Finally, a numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the main results.