Multi-scale feature fusion-based lightweight dual stream transformer for detection of paddy leaf disease

Traditionally, rice leaf disease identification relies on a visual examination of abnormalities or an analytical result obtained by growing bacteria in the research lab. This method of visual evaluation is qualitative and error-prone. On the other hand, an artificial neural network system is fast and more accurate. Several pieces of research using traditional machine learning and deep convolution neural networks (CNN) have been utilized to overcome the issues. Still, these methods need more semantic contextual global and local feature extraction. Due to this, efficiency is less. Hence, in the present study, a multi-scale feature fusion-based RDTNet has been designed. The RDTNet contains two modules, and the first module extracts feature via three scales from the local binary pattern (LBP), gray, and a histogram of orient gradient (HOG) image. The second module extracts semantic global and local features through the transformer and convolution block. Furthermore, the computing cost is reduced by dividing the query into two parts and feeding them to convolution and the transformer block. The results indicate that the proposed method has a very high average precision, f1-score, and accuracy of 99.55%, 99.54%, and 99.53%, respectively. It is suggestive of improved classification accuracy using multi-scale features and the transformer. The model has also been validated on other datasets confirming that the present model can be used for real-time rice disease diagnosis. In the future, such models can be used for monitoring other crops, including wheat, tomato, and potato.