Automatic Mushroom Species Classification Model for Foodborne Disease Prevention Based on Vision Transformer

Mushrooms are the fleshy, spore-bearing structure of certain fungi, produced by a group of mycelia and buried in a substratum. Mushrooms are classified as edible, medicinal, and poisonous. However, many poisoning incidents occur yearly by consuming wild mushrooms. Thousands of poisoning incidents are reported each year globally, and 80% of these are from unidentified species of mushrooms. Mushroom poisoning is one of the most serious food safety issues worldwide. Motivated by this problem, this study uses an open-source mushroom dataset and employs several data augmentation approaches to decrease the probability of model overfitting. We propose a novel deep learning pipeline (ViT-Mushroom) for mushroom classification using the Vision Transformer large network (ViT-L/32). We compared the performance of our method against that of a convolutional neural network (CNN). We visualized the high-dimensional outputs of the ViT-L/32 model to achieve the interpretability of ViT-L/32 using the t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) method. The results show that ViT-L/32 is the best on the testing dataset, with an accuracy score of 95.97%. These results surpass previous approaches in reducing intraclass variability and generating well-separated feature embeddings. The proposed method is a promising deep learning model capable of automatically classifying mushroom species, helping wild mushroom consumers avoid eating toxic mushrooms, safeguarding food safety, and preventing public health incidents of food poisoning. The results will offer valuable resources for food scientists, nutritionists, and the public health sector regarding the safety and quality of mushrooms.