Lightweight Transformer Models for Real-Time Rice Leaf Disease Detection on Edge Devices

Kusuma, Rina; Prasetyo, Bagus

Research article · pp. 1-14

Lightweight Transformer Models for Real-Time Rice Leaf Disease Detection on Edge Devices

Rina Kusuma, Bagus Prasetyo

Universitas Nusantara Raya

Received4 May 2026

Revised23 Jul 2026

Accepted22 Aug 2026

Published21 Sep 2026

Abstract

Rice leaf diseases cause yield losses of up to 30% in smallholder farms, yet most detection models are too heavy for the low-cost devices farmers can afford. We propose a distilled vision transformer with 3.1 million parameters that runs at 24 frames per second on a single-board computer. Trained on 18,400 field images from four provinces, the model reaches 94.6% accuracy across six disease classes, within 1.2 points of a full-size baseline. Field trials with 42 farmers show that diagnosis time fell from days to under a minute.

Keywords

vision transformer edge computing plant disease model compression

Metadata for indexing

Google Scholar tags XML exports

These tags are in this page's <head>. Google Scholar reads them to index the article.

<meta name="citation_title" content="Lightweight Transformer Models for Real-Time Rice Leaf Disease Detection on Edge Devices">
<meta name="citation_author" content="Kusuma, Rina">
<meta name="citation_author_institution" content="Universitas Nusantara Raya">
<meta name="citation_author" content="Prasetyo, Bagus">
<meta name="citation_author_institution" content="Universitas Nusantara Raya">
<meta name="citation_journal_title" content="JURNAL UJI COBA">
<meta name="citation_journal_abbrev" content="JUC">
<meta name="citation_issn" content="1234-273X">
<meta name="citation_publisher" content="Karoteh Utama Publisher">
<meta name="citation_volume" content="1">
<meta name="citation_issue" content="1">
<meta name="citation_firstpage" content="1">
<meta name="citation_lastpage" content="14">
<meta name="citation_publication_date" content="2026/09/21">
<meta name="citation_date" content="2026/09/21">
<meta name="citation_keywords" content="vision transformer; edge computing; plant disease; model compression">
<meta name="citation_language" content="en">
<meta name="citation_abstract_html_url" content="https://uji.purwantoro.my.id/article/1">
<meta name="citation_pdf_url" content="https://uji.purwantoro.my.id/article/1/download/1">
<meta name="DC.Title" content="Lightweight Transformer Models for Real-Time Rice Leaf Disease Detection on Edge Devices">
<meta name="DC.Creator.PersonalName" content="Rina Kusuma">
<meta name="DC.Creator.PersonalName" content="Bagus Prasetyo">
<meta name="DC.Date.issued" content="2026-09-21">
<meta name="DC.Identifier.URI" content="https://uji.purwantoro.my.id/article/1">
<meta name="DC.Rights" content="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">
<meta name="DC.Type" content="Text.Serial.Journal">
<meta name="DC.Type.articleType" content="Machine Learning">