🌿 Vision Transformers vs CNNs on PlantVillage

An AI Experiment That Went Deeper Than Expected When people talk about computer vision today, the conversation almost always turns into CNN vs Vision Transformers (ViT). CNNs dominated vision tasks for years. Then Transformers arrived from NLP and started rewriting the rules. So I decided to run an experiment. Not on ImageNet. Not on some perfectly curated benchmark. But on something messy, real-world, and meaningful: 🌱 Plant disease detection using the PlantVillage dataset Because if AI can help farmers detect crop diseases early, the impact is far bigger than just leaderboard scores. But what started as a simple model comparison turned into one of the most chaotic and insightful experiments I’ve run. Let’s dive in. 🧠 The Question Can Vision Transformers outperform CNNs on plant disease detection? And more importantly: How do they behave on real agricultural datasets? What happens when data distribution shifts? Do Transformers really generalize better? 📊 Dataset: PlantVillage The Plan