A novel Hybrid Vision Transformer with dense attention capsule network (HVT-DACapNet) model for cotton plant disease detection

Image processing plays a vital role in precision agriculture by enabling automated disease detection and crop health monitoring. This research presents a novel Hybrid Vision Transformer with Dense Attention Capsule Network (HVT-DACapNet) model for accurate cotton plant disease detection. The proposed framework integrates Adaptive Wavelet Transform Filtering (AWTF) for noise removal while preserving disease-related features. A Hybrid Vision Transformer (HVT) is employed to extract both local spatial patterns and global contextual dependencies, and the Dense Attention Capsule Network (DACapNet) captures hierarchical spatial relationships with an attention mechanism that emphasizes infected regions. In addition, a hybrid optimization strategy combining Mayfly and Aquila Optimization (HMAO) is used to fine-tune model hyperparameters for improved convergence. The model is evaluated on a publicly available Kaggle cotton leaf disease dataset containing healthy leaves and multiple disease categories including Target Spot, Powdery Mildew, Bacterial Blight, Army Worm, and Aphids, using a 70:15:15 train-validation-test split under the simulation setup and hyperparameter configuration described in the manuscript. The proposed HVT-DACapNet achieves an F1-score of 99.68%, sensitivity of 99.68%, specificity of 98.89%, and an overall accuracy of 99.79%, outperforming existing models such as ConvLSTM-ZOA, GOA, SFO, Inception-V3, and VGG-16.