Enhanced Vision Transformer and Transfer Learning Approach to Improve Rice Disease Recognition

In the evolving landscape of agricultural technology, recognizing rice diseases through computational models is a critical challenge, predominantly addressed through Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). However, the localized feature extraction of CNNs often falls short in complex scenarios, necessitating a shift towards models capable of global contextual understanding. Enter the Vision Transformer (ViT), a paradigm-shifting deep learning model that leverages a self-attention mechanism to transcend the limitations of CNNs by capturing image features in a comprehensive global context. This research embarks on an ambitious journey to refine and adapt the ViT Base(B) transfer learning model for the nuanced task of rice disease recognition. Through meticulous reconfiguration, layer augmentation, and hyperparameter tuning, the study tests the model's prowess across both balanced and imbalanced datasets, revealing its remarkable ability to outperform traditional CNN models, including VGG, MobileNet, and EfficientNet. The proposed ViT model not only achieved superior recall (0.9792), precision (0.9815), specificity (0.9938), f1-score (0.9791), and accuracy (0.9792) on challenging datasets but also established a new benchmark in rice disease recognition, underscoring its potential as a transformative tool in the agricultural domain. This work not only showcases the ViT model's superior performance and stability across diverse tasks and datasets but also illuminates its potential to revolutionize rice disease recognition, setting the stage for future explorations in agricultural AI applications.