CropViT: A light-weight Transformer Model for Crop Disease Detection

Agricultural industry has grown significantly bring sustainable farming practices in improving the food quality, enhancing agricultural productivity and global food security. However, the crop yield and its quality are impacted when the timely identification and management of the crop diseases are not promptly solved. Thus, the crop disease detection becomes the critical aspect in the smart agriculture. Several researchers addressed this crop disease detection by developing optimized solutions through machine learning, deep learning and image processing techniques. However, these techniques face serious challenges when deployed in real-time crop disease identification problems like annotated training images, capturing long-range dependencies, adaption to real-time changes evolving over time and so on. This leads to performance degradation seeking for more powerful applications like some advanced deep learning techniques, in particular, the transformer models. In this paper, a novel crop disease detection model known as CropViT was proposed based on Vision Transformer. This CropViT was developed by fine-tuning the architecture of existing Vision Transformer and PlantVillage dataset was used in the experimental study. Nine crop species were selected and trained using CropViT whose performance was then compared with traditional Convolutional Neural Network model. The experimental study clearly showed the highest mean accuracy of 98.64% for CropViT when compared to 95.52% mean accuracy for traditional CNN. The experimental results also outperformed other existing state-of-the-art models. Finally, the work was concluded with the discussion of experimental results and its future scope of work.