Fpga-accelerated IoT Deployment of a Causal- Attention Multi-modal Deep Learning Network for Precision Crop Disease Monitoring

Abstract

Abstract Outbreaks of plant diseases are major threats to world food security particularly in areas where real-time monitoring and quick decision support are constrained by low-power edge gadgets and untrustworthy connectivity. In order to overcome these issues, this paper presents a FPGA-Accelerated IoT implementation of a Causal-Attention Multi-Modal Deep Learning Network, named EpiFusionNet-Edge, that can be applied to monitor crop diseases with real-world farming scenarios with high precision and scalability. The framework incorporates five data modalities that are complementary in nature and they include RGB leaf pictures, microscopic foldscope images, UAV hyperspectral signatures, microclimate IoT sensor measurements and region-specific pathogen/pest pressure indexes giving a complete picture of the health of the plant. Dual causal-attention mechanism is proposed to simulate both spatial and temporal environmental factor activation, which helps to detect and make predictions at the early stage and provides an explanatory logic behind the decisions. Multi-task learning enables classification of diseases, quantification of their intensity at the level of a micro-prediction and prediction of outbreaks in the short term (1–30 days). In order to achieve deployability in resource-constrained settings, the proposed deep learning architecture is ensemble-distilled, structurally pruned, and INT8-quantized, and hardened on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 FPGA platform. The FPGA accelerator is 43.2x faster inference, 88 percent less power usage, and less than 10 ms latency, which allows real-time execution of continuous field monitoring with IoT sensors. Cross-condition assessment on multi-domain datasets shows that there are great improvements on cross-environment generalization rates with 98.6% classification accuracy, 92.7% severity estimation accuracy and less than 3.5% degradation with domain shift. Grad-CAM + + and causal feature traceability further add interpretability with the focus of the model and the pathological indicators proven by experts. The findings show the promise of using a combination of IoT sensing, multi-modal AI fusion, and FPGA hardware acceleration to develop a deployable and scalable and transparent system with regard to precision agriculture. This paper creates a roadmap to a new generation of smart farming systems that are able to conduct disease surveillance and actively protect crops at the periphery in an autonomous manner.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物病害の画像・センサー観測から病害強度を定量化するマルチモーダル・エッジ推論基盤を開発し、精度・速度・消費電力・ドメインシフトを評価しているため、植物フェノタイピング手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The supplied blocks describe the EpiFusionNet-Edge framework but contain no public phenotype/trait datasets, plant image or sensor data deposits, author analysis code, trained model checkpoints, or supplements with availability statements. The two allowed URLs correspond to cited prior works (references 18 and 24), not

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