The Changing Landscape of Plant Disease Detection: The Role of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Plant diseases constrain agricultural productivity and food security, while conventional diagnosis depends heavily on visible symptoms and specialist expertise, limiting rapid and scalable assessment across heterogeneous agricultural environments. Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly machine learning, deep learning, and computer vision, offers complementary approaches for automated and non-invasive disease detection. This review examines AI-based methods for image classification, object detection, image segmentation, severity assessment, and early or pre-symptomatic disease detection. It also considers the integration of AI with hyperspectral, multispectral, and thermal imaging and unmanned aerial vehicles for crop-scale monitoring and precision management. Reported studies demonstrate high performance under many experimental conditions; however, reliable field deployment remains constrained by limited or imbalanced datasets, symptom similarity, environmental variability, domain shift, computational requirements, and insufficient independent validation. The review further considers explainable artificial intelligence, edge-based computing, multimodal sensing, foundation models, vision-language models, and federated learning as emerging directions. These approaches may improve robustness, interpretability, accessibility, and scalability, but their value depends on representative field data, biological validity, rigorous external validation, and integration with plant-pathology expertise across diverse crops, cultivars, locations, seasons, and imaging conditions. AI should therefore be regarded as a complementary decision-support tool whose practical contribution depends on combining computational methods with biological knowledge and real-world agricultural observations.