State-of-the-Art Deep Learning Algorithms for Internet of Things-Based Detection of Crop Pests and Diseases: A Comprehensive Review

Plant pest and disease management, especially in the early stages of infestation, is a critical challenge that poses significant threats and has potential to devastate agricultural crops, causing total yield loss and food insecurity. Traditional inspection methods are time-consuming and prone to errors due to limited labor expertise. Therefore, to tackle these challenges, harnessing advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Machine Learning/Deep Learning (ML/DL), and Internet of Things (IoT) is essential for managing and mitigating agriculture hazards. This research presents a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art DL architectures integrated with IoT-based systems applied to plant pest and disease detection (PPDD) by investigating different potential approaches that have been employed using DL and IoT up to the year 2024 to address challenges in agriculture. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures for image recognition, object detection, and their integration with IoT, embedded into mobile devices and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are explored. Moreover, the research discusses the advantages and limitations of these techniques, emphasizing their architecture design, efficiency and accuracy. The findings demonstrate that there is a tradeoff between robustness and complexity among existing techniques, and authors recommend future trends aimed at creating robust models with fewer parameters that are more accurate and easily implementable on small IoT-based and portable devices suitable for in-field and real-time applications. Furthermore, while existing review papers discuss either DL or IoT separately, this research paper uniquely focuses on their combined models, providing a comprehensive overview of the synergistic potential of leveraging IoT-driven technologies alongside advanced DL algorithms to ease the task of researchers in the field of precision agriculture particularly in PPDD.