Grapevine Varieties Identification Using Vision Transformers

The grape variety plays an important role in the wine production chain, thus identifying it is crucial for production control. Ampelographers, professionals who identify grape varieties through plant visual analysis, are scarce, and molecular markers are expansive to identify grape varieties on a large scale. In this context, Deep Learning models become an effective way to handle ampelographers scarcity. In this work, we explore the benefit of using deep learning vision transformers architecture relative to conventional CNN to identify 12 grapevine varieties using leaf-centred RGB images acquired in the field. We train an Xception model as a baseline and four different configurations of the ViT_B model. The best model achieved 0.96 of Fl-score, outperforming the state-of-the-art convolutional-based model in the used dataset.