Attention-driven YOLOv11n-DeiT model for enhanced detection of tomato leaf diseases

The tomato plant is considered one of the most important crops in the world, yet it is vulnerable to various diseases that affect crop quality and agricultural productivity. These challenges have driven the need for an efficient and intelligent plant disease detection system. With the development of computer vision and artificial intelligence, this proposed methodology based on deep learning for tomato leaf diseases has been presented. Two public datasets: Taiwan DS with nine classes and Tomato Leaf Diseases Detection Computer Vision Dataset (TLDDCV DS) with seven classes have been used to test this system. This system begins with plant image processing, which includes gamma correction and bilateral filtering, to enhance image quality and clarity while preserving key disease features. Then, a genetic metaheuristic algorithm was used to automatically select the most significant hyperparameters, further optimizing both processing time and accuracy. After that, the tomato leaf disease detection applies the You Only Look Once version 11 Nano (YOLOv11n) model. The YOLOv11n backbone is edited through a Data-efficient Image Transformer (DeiT) to improve the system's capacity for learning global contextual information and long-range dependencies. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms existing methods. It achieved an average mAP@50 of 97.8%, mAP@50-95 of 93.4%, precision of 97.3%, recall of 93.8%, and F1-score of 95.5% on the Taiwan dataset. Additionally, it achieved an average mAP@50 of 87%, mAP@50-95 of 48%, precision of 83.9%, recall of 70.3%, and F1-score of 76.4% on the TLDDCV dataset. These results demonstrate the generalizability and effectiveness of the proposed system in real-world agricultural situations.