- Research Article
- 10.35377/saucis...1777006
Comparative Analysis of Lightweight Vision Transformers and CNNs for Efficient Bacterial Species Classification
- Mar 15, 2026
- Sakarya University Journal of Computer and Information Sciences
- M Amirul Ghiffari + 3 more +3
Food safety requires rapid and accurate bacterial identification to prevent disease and economic losses. This study compares three lightweight deep learning models—Tiny-ViT, ShuffleNetV2, and EfficientNet-Lite—for classifying 33 bacterial species from a combined public dataset. Models were trained using transfer learning with original and augmented data and evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation. Tiny-ViT achieved the highest performance with 99.66% accuracy and 99.70% precision, setting a new state-of-the-art for the DIBaS dataset. EfficientNet-Lite reached 99.32% accuracy with superior efficiency—threefold lower FLOPs (397.49M), fewer parameters (3.41M), and faster inference (0.90 ms/image). Comparison of per-class error rates across four models—Tiny-ViT Original, Tiny-ViT Augmented, EfficientNet-Lite Augmented, and EfficientNet-Lite Original—showed consistent stability, where each bacterial class exhibited low mean error and narrow 95% confidence intervals (CI95%), reflecting statistical reliability. These findings highlight a trade-off: Tiny-ViT offers maximum accuracy, while EfficientNet-Lite provides optimal accuracy–efficiency balance for edge-based bacterial diagnostics.
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