A hybrid Framework for plant leaf disease detection and classification using convolutional neural networks and vision transformer

Recently, scientists have widely utilized Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches in intelligent agriculture to increase the productivity of the agriculture sector and overcome a wide range of problems. Detection and classification of plant diseases is a challenging problem due to the vast numbers of plants worldwide and the numerous diseases that negatively affect the production of different crops. Early detection and accurate classification of plant diseases is the goal of any AI-based system. This paper proposes a hybrid framework to improve classification accuracy for plant leaf diseases significantly. This proposed model leverages the strength of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViT), where an ensemble model, which consists of the well-known CNN architectures VGG16, Inception-V3, and DenseNet20, is used to extract robust global features. Then, a ViT model is used to extract local features to detect plant diseases precisely. The performance proposed model is evaluated using two publicly available datasets (Apple and Corn). Each dataset consists of four classes. The proposed hybrid model successfully detects and classifies multi-class plant leaf diseases and outperforms similar recently published methods, where the proposed hybrid model achieved an accuracy rate of 99.24% and 98% for the apple and corn datasets.