Olive Disease Classification Based on Vision Transformer and CNN Models

It has been noted that disease detection approaches based on deep learning are becoming increasingly important in artificial intelligence-based research in the field of agriculture. Studies conducted in this area are not at the level that is desirable due to the diversity of plant species and the regional characteristics of many of these species. Although numerous researchers have studied diseases on plant leaves, it is undeniable that timely diagnosis of diseases on olive leaves remains a difficult task. It is estimated that people have been cultivating olive trees for 6000 years, making it one of the most useful and profitable fruit trees in history. Symptoms that appear on infected leaves can vary from one plant to another or even between individual leaves on the same plant. Because olive groves are susceptible to a variety of pathogens, including bacterial blight, olive knot, Aculus olearius, and olive peacock spot, it has been difficult to develop an effective olive disease detection algorithm. For this reason, we developed a unique deep ensemble learning strategy that combines the convolutional neural network model with vision transformer model. The goal of this method is to detect and classify diseases that can affect olive leaves. In addition, binary and multiclassification systems based on deep convolutional models were used to categorize olive leaf disease. The results are encouraging and show how effectively CNN and vision transformer models can be used together. Our model outperformed the other models with an accuracy of about 96% for multiclass classification and 97% for binary classification, as shown by the experimental results reported in this study.