Exploring the Application of Drone Imagery in Early Identification of Crop Diseases and Pests
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/vrhw6484Keywords:
High-resolution drones; Crop diseases and pests; Multi-spectral remote sensing; Deep learning; Precision agriculture.Abstract
Early and accurate identification of crop diseases and pests is critical to ensuring food security and sustainable agricultural development. The rapid advancement of high-resolution drone remote sensing technology provides innovative tools for early pest and disease detection. This paper explores the research progress, technical bottlenecks, and future directions of drone imagery technology in crop disease and pest monitoring. The study concludes that multi-spectral, thermal infrared and RGB sensors integrated on drone platforms can collaboratively capture centimeter-level high-resolution data. Through multi-source fusion of spectral, texture, and temporal data combined with lightweight model deployment, early spectral and morphological characteristics of crop stress caused by diseases and pests can be accurately identified, significantly improving detection accuracy compared to traditional satellite remote sensing and single machine learning methods. Case studies demonstrate that drone technology achieves 85%–95% recognition accuracy in monitoring typical diseases such as wheat rust and rice blast while reducing field inspection costs by over 60%. This paper provides a theoretical framework and technical roadmap for precision agriculture, offering practical significance for promoting agricultural digital transformation.
Downloads
References
[1] Chen, X., Zhang, L., & Wang, Y. (2022). Cross-regional generalization challenges in UAV-based pest detection: A case study on corn borers. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 198, 107023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2022.107023
[2] Li, H., Wang, Q., & Liu, S. (2021). Multimodal data fusion for cotton Verticillium wilt monitoring using UAV and ground sensors. Remote Sensing, 13(8), 1532. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13081532
[3] Liu, Z., Zhang, H., & Yang, J. (2022). CBAM-YOLOv5: An improved UAV-based pest detection model with attention mechanism. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 60, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2022.3161028
[4] Wang, L., Li, X., & Chen, R. (2023). Multispectral U-Net++ for rice blast segmentation: Integrating spectral and spatial features from UAV imagery. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 195, 245-258. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2022.11.015
[5] Zhang, Y., Li, M., & Zhou, J. (2019). Early detection of wheat stripe rust using UAV multispectral imagery and machine learning. Precision Agriculture, 20(6), 1125-1143. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11119-019-09639-9
[6] Zhao, C., Zhang, J., & Huang, W. (2021). Thermal infrared imaging for early disease detection in crops: A review of sensor technologies and data analysis methods. Sensors, 21(4), 1235. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21041235
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Highlights in Science, Engineering and Technology

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.