Integrating Convolutional, Transformer, and Graph Neural Networks for Precision Agriculture and Food Security
Integrating Convolutional, Transformer, and Graph Neural Networks for Precision Agriculture and Food Security
Esraa A. Mahareek,Mehmet Akif Çifçi,Abeer S. Desuky
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.
