High-Performance Deep Learning for Instant Pest and Disease Detection in Precision Agriculture

Global farm productivity is constantly under attack from pests and diseases, resulting in massive crop loss and food insecurity. Manual scouting, expert estimation, and laboratory-based microscopy are time-consuming, prone to human error, and labor-intensive. Although traditional machine learning classifiers such as SVM, Random Forest, and Decision Trees provide better accuracy, they are not field deployable. This article presents a high-performance deep learning fusion model using MobileNetV2 and EfficientNetB0 for real-time detection of pests and diseases in precision farming. The model, trained on the CCMT dataset (24,881 original and 102,976 augmented images in 22 classes of cashew, cassava, maize, and tomato crops), attained a global accuracy of 89.5%, precision and recall of 95.68%, F1-score of 95.67%, and ROC-AUC of 0.95. For supporting deployment in edge environments, methods such as quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation were employed to decrease inference time to below 10 ms per image. The suggested model is superior to baseline CNN models, including ResNet-50 (81.25%), VGG-16 (83.10%), and other edge lightweight models (83.00%). The optimized model is run on low-power devices such as smartphones, Raspberry Pi, and farm drones without the need for cloud computing, allowing real-time detection in far-off fields. Field trials using drones validated rapid image capture and inference performance. This study delivers a scalable, cost-effective, and accurate early pest and disease detection framework for sustainable agriculture and supporting food security at the global level. The model has been successfully implemented with TensorFlow Lite within Android applications and Raspberry Pi systems.