CitriBEiTNet: A Hybrid CNN-Transformer Architecture Combining MobileNetV2 with BEiT's Global Attention for Automated Citrus Leaf Disease Diagnosis

Citrus farming plays an essential role in agriculture; however, diseases like canker, greening, black spot, and melanose significantly reduce yield and fruit quality. Efficient classification of citrus leaf diseases is important for crop health maintenance and optimal crop yield. Traditional methods for leaf disease detection are slow, labor-intensive, and often inaccurate, which highlights the need for automated solutions. This research presents a novel hybrid approach for identifying citrus diseases by combining a vision transformer with deep learning architectures. Using Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Image Transformers (BEIT) and MobileNetV2 as feature extractors, the proposed model captures distinctive features from images, which are then classified using Support Vector Machine (SVM). The dataset includes four different disease categories and a healthy class. Data augmentation techniques are applied to improve model robustness. The experimental findings demonstrate that CitriBEiTNet achieves a remarkable training accuracy of 99.82% and a testing accuracy of 99.57%, outperforming current leading techniques. This model provides an efficient, scalable, and economical approach for early disease identification, enabling farmers to take preventive measures and improve agricultural yields.