Petronilla Muriithi

Submitted: 28 February 2026 You are already at the latest version Reliable identification of maize leaf diseases is critical for mitigating crop losses, particularly in regions where farmers have limited access to experts. Although vision transformers (ViTs) have recently demonstrated strong performance in image recognition, their weak inductive bias and limited modelling of local texture patterns make them non-ideal for fine-grained maize leaf disease classification.