Advancing Plant Disease Prediction Accuracy with ViT Based Deep Learning Model

Agriculture is the key source for many people's livelihoods and an important contributor to a country's economy. There is a huge demand to streamline the process in the field of agriculture by integrating Computing into the traditional way of farming. Computing plays a key role in handling this sector with many newer revolutions that would automate the various processes involved in overall farming. Particularly, machine and deep learning based models have shown remarkable results in smart farming. Rice crop is considered in this work which is the major crop in India. It is necessary to meet the demands of the growing population in terms of sufficient production of this crop. One of the key issues in this crop is the plant diseases that impact the overall crop yield production considerably. Among the various diseases, the most commonly occurring disease is White stem Borer. Diagnosing the disease at an early stage could treat the problem at the earliest to ensure the appropriate amount of yield production. In this paper, a Vision transformer (ViT) based deep learning model is proposed to predict the white stem borer disease on the PlantDoc dataset and the results obtained are compared with the other promising CNN based pre trained models like VGG19, InceptionV3, Resnet50. The experimental output shows that Vision transformer based model outperforms the other proven models with an accuracy of 96%.