Lightweight Vision-Transformer Network for Early Insect Pest Identification in Greenhouse Agricultural Environments.

Abstract

This study addresses the challenges of early recognition of fruit and vegetable diseases and pests in facility horticultural greenhouses and the difficulty of real-time deployment on edge devices, and proposes a lightweight cross-scale intelligent recognition network, Light-HortiNet, designed to achieve a balance between high accuracy and high efficiency for automated greenhouse pest and disease detection. The method is built upon a lightweight Mobile-Transformer backbone and integrates a cross-scale lightweight attention mechanism, a small-object enhancement branch, and an alternative block distillation strategy, thereby effectively improving robustness and stability under complex illumination, high-humidity environments, and small-scale target scenarios. Systematic experimental evaluations were conducted on a greenhouse pest and disease dataset covering crops such as tomato, cucumber, strawberry, and pepper. The results demonstrate significant advantages in detection performance, with mAP@50 reaching 0.872, mAP@50:95 reaching 0.561, classification accuracy reaching 0.894, precision reaching 0.886, recall reaching 0.879, and F1-score reaching 0.882, substantially outperforming mainstream lightweight models such as YOLOv8n, YOLOv11n, MobileNetV3, and Tiny-DETR. In terms of small-object recognition capability, the model achieved an mAP-small of 0.536 and a recall-small of 0.589, markedly enhancing detection stability for micro pests such as whiteflies and thrips as well as early-stage disease lesions. In addition, real-time inference performance exceeding 20 FPS was achieved on edge platforms such as Jetson Nano, demonstrating favorable deployment adaptability.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物の病変・病害状態を画像から検出する軽量モデルの開発と性能評価が中心であり、単なる生物学的実験の routine 測定ではない。害虫検出も含むが、早期病変検出という植物状態の推定を技術的に評価しているため含める。

Code and data availability

The supplied blocks describe a custom greenhouse pest/disease dataset (20,700 images) and the Light-HortiNet model, but contain no public dataset deposit, no author code release, and no availability statements or URLs. The dataset is partly self-collected and partly from unspecified public sources, with no repository,

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.