Disease Detection Algorithm for Tea Health Protection Based on Improved Real-Time Detection Transformer

Traditional disease detection methods typically depend on visual assessments conducted by human experts, which are time-consuming and subjective. Thus, there is an urgent demand for automated and efficient approaches to accurately detect and classify tea diseases. This study presents an enhanced Real-Time Detection Transformer (RT-DETR), tailored for the accurate and efficient identification of tea diseases in natural environments. The proposed method integrates three novel components: Faster-LTNet, CG Attention Module, and RMT Spatial Prior Block, to significantly improve computational efficiency, feature representation, and detection capabilities. Faster-LTNet employs partial convolution and hierarchical design to optimize computational resources, while the CG Attention Module enhances multi-head self-attention by introducing grouped feature inputs and cascading operations to reduce redundancy and increase attention diversity. The RMT Spatial Prior Block integrates a Manhattan distance-based spatial decay matrix and linear decomposition strategy to improve global and local context modeling, reducing attention complexity. The enhanced RT-DETR model achieves a detection precision of 89.20% and a processing speed of 346.40 FPS. While the precision improves, the FPS value also increases by 109, which is superior to the traditional model in terms of precision and real-time processing. Additionally, compared to the baseline model, the FLOPs are reduced by 50%, and the overall model size and parameter size are decreased by approximately 50%. These findings indicate that the proposed algorithm is well-suited for efficient, real-time, and lightweight agricultural disease detection.