A fog-aware lightweight vision transformer architecture for real-time coastal landscape recognition on edge devices

Intelligent landscape recognition sits at the heart of smart coastal tourism, yet pushing vision Transformers onto resource-constrained edge hardware remains awkward—the self-attention mechanism scales quadratically with token count, and marine atmospheric haze quietly erodes recognition accuracy long before it is noticed in the laboratory. We propose a hybrid lightweight architecture that swaps standard self-attention in the early stages for depthwise separable convolution token mixers, switches to kernel-based linear attention in the deeper stages, and follows an adaptive channel reduction policy that trims feature dimensions where redundancy is empirically highest. A Fog-Aware Feature Calibration module, motivated by the Koschmieder atmospheric scattering model, is embedded between the convolutional and attention stages so that learned dehazing happens inside the network rather than as a separate preprocessing pass. Training proceeds through a three-phase pipeline that interleaves progressive structured pruning with temperature-scheduled knowledge distillation from a Swin-Base teacher; the composite objective shrinks the model to 4.8 M parameters and 0.91 GFLOPs without abrupt accuracy collapse. On a newly collected 17,565-image dataset spanning eight coastal scene categories across six shoreline regions of Zhejiang Province, our model reaches 92.6% ± 0.4% Top-1 accuracy (mean ± std over three independent runs), the best result among all baselines below 6 M parameters, including the recently released MobileViT-v2, FastViT, TinyViT, EfficientViT and RepViT. On an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano with TensorRT INT8 optimisation the system delivers 18.3 ms latency (54.6 FPS) within a 7.4 W average power envelope, and a 200 m visibility heavy-fog subset that mixes synthetic and real captures shows an 85.7% accuracy retention rate—6.8 percentage points above the strongest baseline. Cross-dataset zero-shot tests on Fujian, Hainan and the Places365 coastal subset, together with deployment benchmarks on Jetson Nano 4 GB and Coral Edge TPU, suggest the design transfers reasonably—though not effortlessly—beyond the original collection sites.