A dual-pass Vision Transformer–U-Net framework with adaptive feature fusion for citrus leaf disease segmentation and classification
摘要
We present a dual-pass deep learning framework for real-time citrus leaf disease analysis that combines a Vision Transformer–U-Net segmentation pipeline with an adaptive ensemble classifier. In the first pass, the ViT–U-Net backbone segments lesions with a mean Intersection over Union of 0.66 and Dice coefficient of 0.78—improving upon a standard U-Net baseline (IoU 0.62, Dice 0.74). A secondary color-threshold refinement sharpens lesion boundaries. We then fuse deep semantic embeddings with handcrafted color, texture, and shape descriptors, and feed them into an ensemble of CNN and transformer heads. This classifier achieves 91.30% overall accuracy—surpassing CNN-only (89.13%) and ViT-only (86.96%) counterparts—and attains a macro-averaged F1 score of 85.76%. Extensive experiments demonstrate robust performance across varied leaf shapes, lighting conditions, and disease categories, establishing a data-efficient, interpretable solution suited to resource-constrained agricultural settings.