Multi-kernel inception-enhanced vision transformer for plant leaf disease recognition

Abstract The timely and precise identification of diseases in plants is essential for efficient disease control and safeguarding of crops. Manual identification of diseases requires expert knowledge in the field, and finding people with domain knowledge is challenging. To overcome the challenge, com...

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Main Authors: Sk Mahmudul Hassan, Kumar Sekhar Roy, Ruhul Amin Hazarika, Mehbub Alam, Mithun Mukherjee
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2025-08-01
Series:Scientific Reports
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Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-16142-x
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author Sk Mahmudul Hassan
Kumar Sekhar Roy
Ruhul Amin Hazarika
Mehbub Alam
Mithun Mukherjee
author_facet Sk Mahmudul Hassan
Kumar Sekhar Roy
Ruhul Amin Hazarika
Mehbub Alam
Mithun Mukherjee
author_sort Sk Mahmudul Hassan
collection DOAJ
description Abstract The timely and precise identification of diseases in plants is essential for efficient disease control and safeguarding of crops. Manual identification of diseases requires expert knowledge in the field, and finding people with domain knowledge is challenging. To overcome the challenge, computer vision-based machine learning techniques have been proposed by the researchers in recent years. Most of these solutions with the standard convolutional neural network (CNN) approaches use uniform background laboratory setup leaf images to identify the diseases. However, only a few works considered real-field images in their work. Therefore, there is a need for a robust CNN architecture that can identify the diseases in plants in both laboratory and real-field conditioned images. In this paper, we have proposed an Inception-Enhanced Vision Transformer (IEViT) architecture to identify diseases in plants. The proposed IEViT architecture extracts local as well as global features, which improves feature learning. The use of multiple filters with different kernel sizes efficiently uses computing resources to extract relevant features without the need for deeper networks. The robustness of the proposed architecture is established by hyper-parameter tuning and comparison with state-of-the-art. In the experiment, we consider five datasets with both laboratory-conditioned and real-field conditioned images. From the experimental results, we see that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning models with fewer parameters. The proposed model achieves an accuracy rate of 99.23% for the apple leaf dataset, 99.70% for the rice dataset, 97.02% for the ibean dataset, 76.51% for the cassava leaf dataset, and 99.41% for the plantvillage dataset.
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spelling doaj-art-436a2dbb371c4d8184aa2224a064d3c02025-08-24T11:25:05ZengNature PortfolioScientific Reports2045-23222025-08-0115111710.1038/s41598-025-16142-xMulti-kernel inception-enhanced vision transformer for plant leaf disease recognitionSk Mahmudul Hassan0Kumar Sekhar Roy1Ruhul Amin Hazarika2Mehbub Alam3Mithun Mukherjee4Manipal Institute of Technology Bengaluru, Manipal Academy of Higher EducationManipal Institute of Technology Bengaluru, Manipal Academy of Higher EducationManipal Institute of Technology Bengaluru, Manipal Academy of Higher EducationDepartment of IT, Indian Institute of Information TechnologyNanjing University of Information Science and TechnologyAbstract The timely and precise identification of diseases in plants is essential for efficient disease control and safeguarding of crops. Manual identification of diseases requires expert knowledge in the field, and finding people with domain knowledge is challenging. To overcome the challenge, computer vision-based machine learning techniques have been proposed by the researchers in recent years. Most of these solutions with the standard convolutional neural network (CNN) approaches use uniform background laboratory setup leaf images to identify the diseases. However, only a few works considered real-field images in their work. Therefore, there is a need for a robust CNN architecture that can identify the diseases in plants in both laboratory and real-field conditioned images. In this paper, we have proposed an Inception-Enhanced Vision Transformer (IEViT) architecture to identify diseases in plants. The proposed IEViT architecture extracts local as well as global features, which improves feature learning. The use of multiple filters with different kernel sizes efficiently uses computing resources to extract relevant features without the need for deeper networks. The robustness of the proposed architecture is established by hyper-parameter tuning and comparison with state-of-the-art. In the experiment, we consider five datasets with both laboratory-conditioned and real-field conditioned images. From the experimental results, we see that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning models with fewer parameters. The proposed model achieves an accuracy rate of 99.23% for the apple leaf dataset, 99.70% for the rice dataset, 97.02% for the ibean dataset, 76.51% for the cassava leaf dataset, and 99.41% for the plantvillage dataset.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-16142-xPlant diseaseMachine learningVision transformerDeep learning
spellingShingle Sk Mahmudul Hassan
Kumar Sekhar Roy
Ruhul Amin Hazarika
Mehbub Alam
Mithun Mukherjee
Multi-kernel inception-enhanced vision transformer for plant leaf disease recognition
Scientific Reports
Plant disease
Machine learning
Vision transformer
Deep learning
title Multi-kernel inception-enhanced vision transformer for plant leaf disease recognition
title_full Multi-kernel inception-enhanced vision transformer for plant leaf disease recognition
title_fullStr Multi-kernel inception-enhanced vision transformer for plant leaf disease recognition
title_full_unstemmed Multi-kernel inception-enhanced vision transformer for plant leaf disease recognition
title_short Multi-kernel inception-enhanced vision transformer for plant leaf disease recognition
title_sort multi kernel inception enhanced vision transformer for plant leaf disease recognition
topic Plant disease
Machine learning
Vision transformer
Deep learning
url https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-16142-x
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AT kumarsekharroy multikernelinceptionenhancedvisiontransformerforplantleafdiseaserecognition
AT ruhulaminhazarika multikernelinceptionenhancedvisiontransformerforplantleafdiseaserecognition
AT mehbubalam multikernelinceptionenhancedvisiontransformerforplantleafdiseaserecognition
AT mithunmukherjee multikernelinceptionenhancedvisiontransformerforplantleafdiseaserecognition