Enhancing detection of common bean diseases using Fast Gradient Sign Method–trained Vision Transformers

Common bean production in Tanzania is threatened by diseases such as bean rust and bean anthracnose, with early detection critical for effective management. This study presents a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based deep learning model enhanced with adversarial training to improve disease detection robustness under real-world farm conditions. A dataset of 100,000 annotated images augmented with geometric, color, and FGSM-based perturbations, simulating field variability. FGSM was selected for its computational efficiency in low-resource settings. The model, fine-tuned using transfer learning and validated through cross-validation, achieved an accuracy of 99.4%. Results highlight the effectiveness of integrating adversarial robustness to enhance model reliability for mobile-based plant disease detection in resource-constrained environments.