Integrated design of an efficient multi spectral imaging and federated learning framework for precision crop disease diagnosis in low-resource farming communities

Abstract

Crop diseases pose significant challenges to productivity in resource-constrained settings, often remaining undiagnosed when diagnostic tools and infrastructure are either non-existent or inadequate. Current crop disease diagnosis relies on manual inspection methods that are labor-intensive, prone to error, and incapable of delivering real-time or region-specific insights in the process. Such limitations call for developing advanced diagnostic systems that are scalable and efficient in resource-constrained settings. This research introduced a comprehensive multi-spectral imaging and machine learning framework that can easily revolutionize the disease diagnosis and management inside the low-resource farming communities. Built within its core is the 3D Spectral-Spatial Convolutional Neural Network (3D SSCNN) that extracts high-resolution spectral-spatial features from hyperspectral image cubes. The accuracy achieved is around ~ 95% within 0.3 s per sample. Fed-DiagNet has provided support for distributed training that enables scalability and also data privacy to enhance the accuracy of regional models at approximately 92% as well as reduces training by almost 40%. Temporal disease progression modeling is enabled by Temporal Progression LSTM that provides dynamic trends with 90% accuracy up to a horizon of 10 days. This means that in addition to integrating disparate data sources-including hyperspectral imagery, environmental data, and pest observations-MTAN achieves an almost ~ 93% stress identification accuracy. Lastly, an RL-FO system tailors its treatment recommendations to local conditions so as to optimize for yield improvement and cost-effectiveness. With the proposed system, diagnostic precision increases to ~ 94%, and it is manifested in real-time efficiency while supporting scalability with actionable insights to empower farmers to mitigate crop losses and augment food security across several scenarios.