Automated Detection of Harmful Insects in Agriculture: A Smart Framework Leveraging IoT, Machine Learning, and Blockchain

Paddy cultivation is a significant global economic sector, with rice production playing a crucial role in influencing worldwide economies. However, insects in paddy farms predominantly impact the growth rate and ecological equilibrium of the agricultural field. Hence, the precise and timely identification of insects in agricultural settings presents a potential strategy for addressing this issue. This study aims to implement an automated system for paddy farming by employing a real-time framework that incorporates the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain technology, and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms. The primary emphasis of the DL-based system is on the timely identification of pests. In contrast, integrating the IoT and blockchain technologies facilitates stablishing a fully automated system with security within the agricultural domain. The DL-based system includes a secondary dataset of paddy insects, and then preprocessing, feature extraction, and identification have been performed. Besides, an IoT-based system is embodied with a camera module and microprocessor, accompanied by some apparatus required to automate the whole system. In addition, the research also includes the blockchain to secure each individual data transmission among the several IoT components and the cloud server. While examining the proposed solution, various experimental data have been systematically documented and analyzed. The proposed framework attained a peak accuracy of 98.91% using the VGG19 model and ensemble classifiers to detect the pest with a specificity of 99.14% and a precision of 98.21%. The study additionally quantifies the mean duration of the cloud response when integrated with IoT, yielding an average time of 1.71 s after pest identification. Nevertheless, the system has exhibited a high level of efficacy in the context of real-time monitoring and automation of paddy farms.