Integrated Deep Learning Framework Designed on Hybrid Optimization Strategies for Automated Health Detection and Analysis in Silkworms

Shrimp diseases continue to cause devastating losses in the aquaculture industry, driving a critical need for robust, automated detection. This work contributes the first application of Vision Transformers (ViT) and Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) to the shrimp farming domain, addressing both performance bottlenecks and data labeling challenges. We propose two deep learning pipelines to classify four key diseases: Healthy, Black Gill (BG), White Spot Syndrome Virus (WSSV), and a co-infection of both using a dataset of 4,348 images. First, our supervised transfer-learning approach leverages ImageNet-pretrained ViT-Small/16 and EfficientNet backbones. Second, we introduce a contrastive learning framework (SimCLR) with a ViT-Small encoder to extract robust representations from unlabeled images prior to fine-tuning. Our results establish strong new baselines for sustainable aquaculture monitoring. The supervised approach achieves an outstanding 96% accuracy with fast convergence, outperforming traditional generic models, while the label-efficient SSL approach reaches a highly competitive 85% validation accuracy.

This study proposes an overall deep learning architecture for multi-class classification of plant diseases from high-resolution leaf imagery, with a particular interest in investigating the behavior of ResNet-50 and a hybrid ResNet + Vision Transformer (ViT) design. A specially gathered image database with 15,200 training images and 3,800 validation images spanning 38 classes across multiple crops, including tomato, apple, grape etc. were subjected to preprocessing steps such as resizing, normalization, and data augmentation to enhance model robustness. Multiple architectures, including ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNet-B0, were trained and compared with the hybrid ResNet + ViT model. All models were fine-tuned using the AdamW optimizer and cross-entropy loss, with early stopping applied to prevent overfitting and ensure generalization. Furthermore, interpretability techniques such as Grad-CAM and saliency maps were implemented to indicate disease-relevant regions, while segmentation-based analysis was performed to identify the affected parts of a leaf. For every one of the considered architectures, ResNet-50 led to the highest accuracy of 98.74%, whereas the hybrid ResNet + ViT model achieved a competitive accuracy of 98.58%, showing that the hybrid architectures were effective in capturing both local and overall information. The experimental results showcase the promise of transformer-based models to achieve highly accurate, interpretable, and computationally efficient computer-based multi-class multi-disease classification systems, providing helpful assistance for cultivation management practices as well as for precision farming.

This work presents a new Hybrid Dense SwinV2, a two-branch framework that jointly leverages densely connected convolutional features and hierarchical customized Swin Transformer V2 (SwinV2) representations for cassava disease classification. The proposed framework captures high resolution local features through its DenseNet branch, preserving the fine structural cues and also allowing for effective gradient flow. Concurrently, the customized SwinV2 models global contextual dependencies through the idea of shifted-window self attention, which enables the capture of long range interactions critical in distinguishing between visually similar lesions. Moreover, an attention channel-squeeze module is employed for each CNN Transformer stream independently to emphasize discriminative disease related responses and suppress redundant or background driven activations. Finally, these discriminative channels are fused to achieve refined representations from the dense local and SwinV2 global correlated strengthened feature maps, respectively. The proposed Dense SwinV2 utilized a public cassava leaf disease dataset of 31000 images, comprised of five diseases, including brown streak, mosaic, green mottle, bacterial blight, and normal leaf conditions. The proposed Dense SwinV2 demonstrates a significant classification accuracy of 98.02 percent with an F1 score of 97.81 percent, outperforming well-established convolutional and transformer models. These results underline the fact that Hybrid Dense SwinV2 offers robustness and practicality in the field level diagnosis of cassava disease and real world challenges related to occlusion, noise, and complex backgrounds.