GAN-augmented vision transformer with balanced synthetic data generation for robust rice leaf disease detection

Abstract

Early and accurate identification of rice leaf diseases is essential for sustainable crop management; however, many existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based solutions struggle with class imbalance and limited robustness when applied to real-field data. In this work, a generative adversarial network (GAN) augmented vision transformer (ViT) framework is introduced to overcome these limitations. A deep size representative samples for underrepresented disease categories, resulting in a more balanced training dataset and achieving a Fréchet inception distance (FID) score of 18.6. The balanced dataset is then used to train a vision transformer model that leverages self-attention to capture global contextual features of rice leaf images. Experimental evaluation across ten disease classes shows that the proposed approach attains an overall classification accuracy of 96.5%, exceeding the performance of several established CNN architectures. Additionally, the model demonstrates strong generalization capability on an external field dataset, achieving 94.8% accuracy. To validate real-world applicability, the trained model is deployed on a Jetson Nano edge device, where it delivers efficient inference performance suitable for practical agricultural applications. The findings indicate that combining GAN-based data augmentation with transformer-based learning provides a reliable and scalable solution for rice leaf disease detection.