Swin-SHARP: a novel approach to wheat disease classification using boosted MAML and weighted ensembling with deep...

The global food security is severely threatened by various bacterial and fungal diseases that significantly degrade the quality, yield and productivity of wheat crop. This increases the need for an accurate and efficient system to improve wheat yield and mitigate these losses by enabling early intervention. The dataset used in this research comprises of 10,000 images from brown rust, yellow rust, powdery mildew, loose smut diseases and healthy wheat plants. The existing neural networks, ensembling and transformer-based models used for classifying wheat diseases are limited by high computational resource requirements that leads to inefficient feature extraction. These challenges are addressed by proposing a customized, lightweight and optimized Swin-Streamlined High Accuracy and Reduced Parameters (Swin-SHARP) transformer, a lightweight and optimized transformer model that enhances feature extraction while significantly reducing computational overhead. In particular, Swin-SHARP results in 82.5% reduction (48.9M to 8.5M parameters), making it an attractive solution for resource-constrained environments. The extracted features are further optimized by integrating the Swin-SHARP transformer with boosted Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) and a weighted ensembling strategy to enhance generalization and classification accuracy. Our proposed model achieves a remarkable 98.1% accuracy, significantly outperforming existing CNN-based solutions, ensemble approaches, transformer, and deep learning models. We also cross-validated our proposed model on an unseen wheat plant diseases dataset, achieving 95.57% accuracy. Our proposed model is also compared against prominent models such as Inception-v3, ResNet-18, and VGG-16, which outperforms them by 1.6%, 1.7%, and 2.6%, respectively. The comparison with existing state-of-the-art models, including Sequential CNN, SGDR-S, Inception-v3, Cereal Conv, Darknet-53 CNN, EfficientNet B3, GLNet, CNN & SVM, Customized CNN, CaiT-YOLOv9 and MSFNet revealed that our method outperforms them by 0.6%, 5.8%, 5.3%, 0.75%, 2.8%, 2.68%, 1.42%, 1.3%, 3.31%, 3.29%, and 2.4% respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the Swin-SHARP transformer for wheat disease classification, particularly for real-time agricultural applications on mobile and embedded systems aimed at early disease detection and crop management.