ED-Swin Transformer: A Cassava Disease Classification Model Integrated with UAV Images

The outbreak of cassava diseases poses a serious threat to agricultural economic security and food production systems in tropical regions. Traditional manual monitoring methods are limited by efficiency bottlenecks and insufficient spatial coverage. Although low-altitude drone technology offers adva...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jing Zhang, Hao Zhou, Kunyu Liu, Yuguang Xu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-04-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/25/8/2432
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1850155040857128960
author Jing Zhang
Hao Zhou
Kunyu Liu
Yuguang Xu
author_facet Jing Zhang
Hao Zhou
Kunyu Liu
Yuguang Xu
author_sort Jing Zhang
collection DOAJ
description The outbreak of cassava diseases poses a serious threat to agricultural economic security and food production systems in tropical regions. Traditional manual monitoring methods are limited by efficiency bottlenecks and insufficient spatial coverage. Although low-altitude drone technology offers advantages such as high resolution and strong timeliness, it faces dual challenges in the field of disease identification, such as complex background interference and irregular disease morphology. To address these issues, this study proposes an intelligent classification method for cassava diseases based on drone imagery and an ED-Swin Transformer. Firstly, we introduced the EMAGE (Efficient Multi-Scale Attention with Grouping and Expansion) module, which integrates the global distribution features and local texture details of diseased leaves in drone imagery through a multi-scale grouped attention mechanism, effectively mitigating the interference of complex background noise on feature extraction. Secondly, the DASPP (Deformable Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling) module was designed to use deformable atrous convolution to adaptively match the irregular boundaries of diseased areas, enhancing the model’s robustness to morphological variations caused by angles and occlusions in low-altitude drone photography. The results show that the ED-Swin Transformer model achieved excellent performance across five evaluation metrics, with scores of 94.32%, 94.56%, 98.56%, 89.22%, and 96.52%, representing improvements of 1.28%, 2.32%, 0.38%, 3.12%, and 1.4%, respectively. These experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the ED-Swin Transformer model in cassava classification networks.
format Article
id doaj-art-aaf3d5ab09e648168c2017e01934f9ee
institution OA Journals
issn 1424-8220
language English
publishDate 2025-04-01
publisher MDPI AG
record_format Article
series Sensors
spelling doaj-art-aaf3d5ab09e648168c2017e01934f9ee2025-08-20T02:25:04ZengMDPI AGSensors1424-82202025-04-01258243210.3390/s25082432ED-Swin Transformer: A Cassava Disease Classification Model Integrated with UAV ImagesJing Zhang0Hao Zhou1Kunyu Liu2Yuguang Xu3College of Artificial Intelligence & Computer Science, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710600, ChinaCollege of Artificial Intelligence & Computer Science, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710600, ChinaSchool of Economics and Management, Xidian University, Xi’an 710126, ChinaCollege of Artificial Intelligence & Computer Science, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710600, ChinaThe outbreak of cassava diseases poses a serious threat to agricultural economic security and food production systems in tropical regions. Traditional manual monitoring methods are limited by efficiency bottlenecks and insufficient spatial coverage. Although low-altitude drone technology offers advantages such as high resolution and strong timeliness, it faces dual challenges in the field of disease identification, such as complex background interference and irregular disease morphology. To address these issues, this study proposes an intelligent classification method for cassava diseases based on drone imagery and an ED-Swin Transformer. Firstly, we introduced the EMAGE (Efficient Multi-Scale Attention with Grouping and Expansion) module, which integrates the global distribution features and local texture details of diseased leaves in drone imagery through a multi-scale grouped attention mechanism, effectively mitigating the interference of complex background noise on feature extraction. Secondly, the DASPP (Deformable Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling) module was designed to use deformable atrous convolution to adaptively match the irregular boundaries of diseased areas, enhancing the model’s robustness to morphological variations caused by angles and occlusions in low-altitude drone photography. The results show that the ED-Swin Transformer model achieved excellent performance across five evaluation metrics, with scores of 94.32%, 94.56%, 98.56%, 89.22%, and 96.52%, representing improvements of 1.28%, 2.32%, 0.38%, 3.12%, and 1.4%, respectively. These experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the ED-Swin Transformer model in cassava classification networks.https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/25/8/2432UAVimage processingplant diseaseswin transformer
spellingShingle Jing Zhang
Hao Zhou
Kunyu Liu
Yuguang Xu
ED-Swin Transformer: A Cassava Disease Classification Model Integrated with UAV Images
Sensors
UAV
image processing
plant disease
swin transformer
title ED-Swin Transformer: A Cassava Disease Classification Model Integrated with UAV Images
title_full ED-Swin Transformer: A Cassava Disease Classification Model Integrated with UAV Images
title_fullStr ED-Swin Transformer: A Cassava Disease Classification Model Integrated with UAV Images
title_full_unstemmed ED-Swin Transformer: A Cassava Disease Classification Model Integrated with UAV Images
title_short ED-Swin Transformer: A Cassava Disease Classification Model Integrated with UAV Images
title_sort ed swin transformer a cassava disease classification model integrated with uav images
topic UAV
image processing
plant disease
swin transformer
url https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/25/8/2432
work_keys_str_mv AT jingzhang edswintransformeracassavadiseaseclassificationmodelintegratedwithuavimages
AT haozhou edswintransformeracassavadiseaseclassificationmodelintegratedwithuavimages
AT kunyuliu edswintransformeracassavadiseaseclassificationmodelintegratedwithuavimages
AT yuguangxu edswintransformeracassavadiseaseclassificationmodelintegratedwithuavimages