AI-Driven Plant Disease and Pest Surveillance: Deep Learning, IoT, and Next-Generation Crop Protection

Abstract

Plant disease and pest surveillance is undergoing a profound technological transition. Conventional crop protection has historically depended on episodic field scouting, expert visual inspection, and broad-spectrum preventative spraying, all of which are constrained by labour intensity, uneven diagnostic accuracy, and weak temporal resolution. In contrast, recent advances in artificial intelligence, deep learning, the Internet of Things, remote sensing, and edge computing have enabled crop-health monitoring systems that are more continuous, data-rich, and spatially explicit. This review analyses the evolution of AI-driven plant disease and pest surveillance, with particular attention to how image-based deep learning, connected environmental sensing, unmanned aerial vehicle platforms, cloud-edge infrastructures, and multimodal analytics are reshaping next-generation crop protection. The article argues that the central innovation is not merely automated diagnosis, but the emergence of surveillance ecosystems capable of recognising symptoms, estimating risk, localising hotspots, and informing more selective intervention. The review synthesises major developments in convolutional neural networks, object detection, semantic segmentation, transfer learning, domain adaptation, transformer-based computer vision, anomaly detection, environmental time-series modelling, and multimodal analytics. It also evaluates the practical obstacles that still limit real-world deployment, including dataset bias, annotation uncertainty, poor cross-domain generalisation, limited interoperability, energy and connectivity constraints, weak model explainability, and uneven economic accessibility. The article further considers how AI-based surveillance may strengthen integrated pest management by supporting earlier warning, more precise treatment timing, reduced blanket pesticide use, and stronger alignment between biological risk and management action. It concludes that the future of crop protection will depend less on isolated improvements in benchmark accuracy and more on the development of trustworthy, scalable, and biologically meaningful surveillance systems that can support sustainable decisions under real agricultural conditions.