ResMDCL-PDM: An IoT-Enabled Multi-Task Deep Learning Framework for Precision Pest and Disease Management in Maize and Rice Production

Abstract

Abstract Pests and diseases are major constraints to cereal production, reducing crop yield, farm profitability, and food security worldwide. Timely detection of crop health threats and accurate assessment of infection severity are essential for effective crop protection, yet conventional field scouting remains labor-intensive, subjective, and unsuitable for real-time decision-making. Although recent advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) and deep learning have enhanced automated crop monitoring, most existing approaches focus on single-task disease classification and provide limited support for severity-aware management. This study proposes ResMDCL-PDM (Residual Network with Multi-Dimensional Compensation Layer for Pest and Disease Management), an IoT-enabled multi-task deep learning framework for precision pest and disease management in maize and rice production. The framework combines field-based environmental sensing with a modified ResNet-50 architecture enhanced by a Multi-Dimensional Compensation Layer (MDCL) to jointly identify crop species, classify pest and disease categories, and estimate infection severity. Field images collected from maize and rice farms at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria, were integrated with publicly available benchmark datasets. Following preprocessing and data augmentation, 8,556 annotated images were used for model development and evaluation. The proposed framework achieved an overall classification accuracy of 97.8% , outperforming AlexNet, VGG16, MobileNetV3, DenseNet121, EfficientNet-B0, and the baseline ResNet-50. High precision, recall, and F1-score, together with ablation analysis, confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed MDCL. The results demonstrate that integrating IoT-enabled monitoring with multi-task deep learning provides reliable, severity-aware decision support for targeted crop protection and offers a practical, scalable solution for sustainable precision agriculture.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物画像から病害・害虫カテゴリーと感染重症度を推定するIoT・深層学習フレームワークの開発と評価が中心であり、感染植物の状態を直接測定する方法論的研究である。

Code and data availability

The supplied blocks describe field images collected at FUNAAB integrated with public benchmark datasets, but no public deposit, repository, or availability URL for the paper's own image dataset, annotations, code, or trained model is stated. All listed URLs are citations to prior work, not paper-specific assets.

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