An Information Entropy Masked Vision Transformer (IEM-ViT) Model for Recognition of Tea Diseases

Tea is one of the most popular drinks in the world. The rapid and accurate recognition of tea diseases is of great significance for taking targeted preventive measures. In this paper, an information entropy masked vision transformation (IEM-ViT) model was proposed for the rapid and accurate recognition of tea diseases. The information entropy weighting (IEW) method was used to calculate the IE of each segment of the image, so that the model could learn the maximum amount of knowledge and information more quickly and accurately. An asymmetric encoder–decoder architecture was used in the masked autoencoder (MAE), where the encoder operated on only a subset of visible patches and the decoder recovered the labeled masked patches, reconstructing the missing pixels for parameter sharing and data augmentation. The experimental results showed that the proposed IEM-ViT had an accuracy of 93.78% for recognizing the seven types of tea diseases. In comparison to the currently common image recognition algorithms including the ResNet18, VGG16, and VGG19, the recognition accuracy was improved by nearly 20%. Additionally, in comparison to the other six published tea disease recognition methods, the proposed IEM-ViT model could recognize more types of tea diseases and the accuracy was improved simultaneously.