Real-time and lightweight detection of grape diseases based on Fusion Transformer YOLO.

Introduction: Grapes are prone to various diseases throughout their growth cycle, and the failure to promptly control these diseases can result in reduced production and even complete crop failure. Therefore, effective disease control is essential for maximizing grape yield. Accurate disease identification plays a crucial role in this process. In this paper, we proposed a real-time and lightweight detection model called Fusion Transformer YOLO for 4 grape diseases detection. The primary source of the dataset comprises RGB images acquired from plantations situated in North China. Methods: Firstly, we introduce a lightweight high-performance VoVNet, which utilizes ghost convolutions and learnable downsampling layer. This backbone is further improved by integrating effective squeeze and excitation blocks and residual connections to the OSA module. These enhancements contribute to improved detection accuracy while maintaining a lightweight network. Secondly, an improved dual-flow PAN+FPN structure with Real-time Transformer is adopted in the neck component, by incorporating 2D position embedding and a single-scale Transformer Encoder into the last feature map. This modification enables real-time performance and improved accuracy in detecting small targets. Finally, we adopt the Decoupled Head based on the improved Task Aligned Predictor in the head component, which balances accuracy and speed. Results: Experimental results demonstrate that FTR-YOLO achieves the high performance across various evaluation metrics, with a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 90.67%, a Frames Per Second (FPS) of 44, and a parameter size of 24.5M. Conclusion: The FTR-YOLO presented in this paper provides a real-time and lightweight solution for the detection of grape diseases. This model effectively assists farmers in detecting grape diseases.