AI-Driven Smart Farming for Automated Plant Health Monitoring and Nutrient Deficiency Detection

Abstract

Precision agriculture is transitioning to continuous, data-driven monitoring. Affordable sensors and edge intelligence enable near real-time crop oversight. Manual scouting is labor-intensive and inconsistent. Delayed detection of nutrient stress leads to increased yield loss and input waste. Legacy systems monitor soil or weather in isolation and depend on periodic human checks. Vision pipelines often use shallow models and are not connected to field actuators. Proposed work: We combine soil moisture, temperature, and humidity sensing with camera-based leaf analysis using a DenseNet 121 classifier. A microcontroller executes closed-loop irrigation and localized cooling, with a mobile app for telemetry and alerts. RGB leaf images were captured in field conditions and labeled by experts into healthy and deficiency classes. Images were resized to 224×224 and split into training, validation, and test sets by plot to avoid leakage. DenseNet 121 achieved 89.0% accuracy on a held-out test set and surpassed a MobileNet V2 baseline of 82.0% under identical training conditions. Prototype deployments reduced manual checks and improved response to moisture and heat stress. The integrated IoT and AI pipeline is practical for early detection of nutrient deficiencies and autonomous actuation in small plots and greenhouses.