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Integrating Convolutional, Transformer, and Graph Neural Networks for Precision Agriculture and Food Security

Esraa A. Mahareek,Mehmet Akif Çifçi,Abeer S. Desuky

2025 · DOI: 10.3390/agriengineering7100353
AgriEngineering · 4 Citations

TLDR

The proposed AgroVisionNet is a hybrid deep learning framework that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks for local feature extraction, Vision Transformers for capturing long-range global dependencies, and Graph Neural Networks for modeling spatial relationships between image regions that establishes a new benchmark for deep learning applications in precision agriculture.

Abstract

Ensuring global food security requires accurate and robust solutions for crop health monitoring, weed detection, and large-scale land-cover classification. To this end, we propose AgroVisionNet, a hybrid deep learning framework that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for local feature extraction, Vision Transformers (ViTs) for capturing long-range global dependencies, and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for modeling spatial relationships between image regions. The framework was evaluated on five diverse benchmark datasets—PlantVillage (leaf-level disease detection), Agriculture-Vision (field-scale anomaly segmentation), BigEarthNet (satellite-based land-cover classification), UAV Crop and Weed (weed segmentation), and EuroSAT (multi-class land-cover recognition). Across these datasets, AgroVisionNet consistently outperformed strong baselines including ResNet-50, EfficientNet-B0, ViT, and Mask R-CNN. For example, it achieved 97.8% accuracy and 95.6% IoU on PlantVillage, 94.5% accuracy on Agriculture-Vision, 92.3% accuracy on BigEarthNet, 91.5% accuracy on UAV Crop and Weed, and 96.4% accuracy on EuroSAT. These results demonstrate the framework’s robustness across tasks ranging from fine-grained disease detection to large-scale anomaly mapping. The proposed hybrid approach addresses persistent challenges in agricultural imaging, including class imbalance, image quality variability, and the need for multi-scale feature integration. By combining complementary architectural strengths, AgroVisionNet establishes a new benchmark for deep learning applications in precision agriculture.