Lightweight grape leaf disease recognition method based on transformer framework

Grape disease image recognition is an important part of agricultural disease detection. Accurately identifying diseases allows for timely prevention and control at an early stage, which plays a crucial role in reducing yield losses. This study addresses the problems in grape leaf disease recognition under small-sample conditions, such as the difficulty in capturing multi-scale features, the minuteness of features, and the weak adaptability of traditional data augmentation methods. It proposes a solution that combines a multi-scale feature hybrid fusion architecture with data augmentation. The innovation of this study lies in the following four dimensions: (1) Utilize generative models to enhance the cross-category data balancing ability under small-sample conditions and enrich the sample information in the dataset. (2) Innovatively propose the LVT Block, a multi-scale information perception hybrid module based on the Ghost and Transformer structures. This module can effectively acquire and fuse multi-scale information and global information in the feature map. (3) Use the dense connection method to combine the LVT Block and the MARI Block to propose a new architecture, the DLVT Block. By fusing multi-scale information and global information, it improves the richness of feature information. It also uses the MARI to enhance the model's perception of disease areas and constructs an end-to-end lightweight model, DLVTNet, using the DLVT Block. Experiments show that this method achieves an average recognition rate of 98.48% on the New Plant Diseases Dataset. The number of parameters is reduced to 42.7% of that of MobileNetV4, and it maintains an accuracy of 96.12% in the tomato leaf disease test. This paper embeds pathological features into the generative adversarial process, which can effectively alleviate the problem of insufficient samples in intelligent agricultural detection. It provides a new method system with strong interpretability and excellent generalization performance for disease detection.