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 Rea...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhijie Lin, Zilong Zhu, Lingling Guo, Jingjing Chen, Jiyi Wu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-02-01
Series:Applied Sciences
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/15/4/2063
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:2076-3417