MobilePlantViT: A Mobile-friendly Hybrid ViT for Generalized Plant Disease Image Classification
This work addresses the need for accessible, resource-efficient AI solutions for smart agriculture to combat plant diseases, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing Vision Transformer architectures.
The authors tackled the challenge of deploying deep learning models for plant disease classification on mobile and edge devices by proposing MobilePlantViT, a lightweight hybrid Vision Transformer, which achieved test accuracies from 80% to over 99% with only 0.69 million parameters, outperforming existing models.
Plant diseases significantly threaten global food security by reducing crop yields and undermining agricultural sustainability. AI-driven automated classification has emerged as a promising solution, with deep learning models demonstrating impressive performance in plant disease identification. However, deploying these models on mobile and edge devices remains challenging due to high computational demands and resource constraints, highlighting the need for lightweight, accurate solutions for accessible smart agriculture systems. To address this, we propose MobilePlantViT, a novel hybrid Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture designed for generalized plant disease classification, which optimizes resource efficiency while maintaining high performance. Extensive experiments across diverse plant disease datasets of varying scales show our model's effectiveness and strong generalizability, achieving test accuracies ranging from 80% to over 99%. Notably, with only 0.69 million parameters, our architecture outperforms the smallest versions of MobileViTv1 and MobileViTv2, despite their higher parameter counts. These results underscore the potential of our approach for real-world, AI-powered automated plant disease classification in sustainable and resource-efficient smart agriculture systems. All codes will be available in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/moshiurtonmoy/MobilePlantViT