Deep Transformer-Based Visual Framework for Early Detection of Plant Leaf Pathologies

Abstract

Accurate and quick detection of plant leaf diseases is essential for precision agriculture to intervene promptly and boost crop yields. A new deep learning model called ResVNet has been introduced in this study. It combines the powerful local feature detection of ResNet152 with the global attention capabilities of Vision Transformer (ViT) and utilises Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to accelerate fine-tuning. The PlantVillage dataset, which contains both healthy and diseased tomato samples, was used to train and test ResVNet. Experimental evaluation on the PlantVillage tomato dataset using stratified 5-fold cross-validation demonstrates that the proposed ResVNet model achieves a mean classification accuracy of 97.45%, along with superior macro-precision, macro-recall, and macro-F1 scores compared to existing deep learning architectures. The results of the confusion matrix and the ROC analysis validate its discriminatory power. The results highlight the potential of architectures strengthened with transformers in agricultural diagnostics. For real-time disease detection in the field, ResVNet is perfect for edge device deployment on drones and smartphones thanks to its high accuracy and adaptability. The application of Explainable AI (XAI) technologies for interpretability, integration with the Internet of Things (IoT), and multi-crop classification will all be explored in future studies. We will also look into model compression approaches so we can deploy efficiently in low-resource settings without sacrificing performance.