Deep Hybrid Model for Pest Detection: IoT-UAV-Based Smart Agriculture System

Modern technology is revolutionising traditional farming processes by introducing new and streamlined approaches. Despite these advancements, challenges such as disease identification, insect detection and weather forecasting persist. To address these issues, this work proposes a DHMPD-based IoT-UAV smart agriculture system focused on pest detection. The method involves several stages: data acquisition, preprocessing, data augmentation, segmentation, feature extraction and classification. During data acquisition, a ‘Pest data set’ is collected. Preprocessing includes Z-score normalisation to produce better-normalised images. Data augmentation involves rotating images to create different orientations. The segmentation stage uses an updated HDBSCAN process, which improves the distance calculation between pixels using hybridised Euclidean and Minkowski distances. Feature extraction retrieves various features from segmented images, including modified MBP features, colour-based features and shape-based features. After feature extraction, the classification phase is performed by a hybrid technique with DL approaches such as improved DBN and LSTM approaches. Finally, classification results are averaged to predict pest detection accurately. The approach's effectiveness is evaluated through various assessments, aiming to overcome current limitations and enhance smart agriculture systems. The proposed DHMPD method was compared with state-of-the-art approaches and traditional classifiers, achieving a maximum accuracy of 0.936, outperforming conventional methods in accurately detecting pests. Hence, the proposed work holds immense promise to advance the capabilities of smart agriculture systems, offering practical solutions that can benefit farmers, agricultural researchers and industries involved in crop management and food production.