Cognitive UAV-driven agro-surveillance framework for predicting crop stress–induced yield loss using spatio-temporal learning and adaptive irrigation control

Abstract

Precision agriculture is becoming more and more of a challenge that requires the use of intelligent systems that are able to predict stress and prevent yield loss before it is too late. Traditional methods of agricultural surveillance are predominantly reactive with irrigation demands being based on thresholds or individual yield forecasts models that do not represent the intricate spatio-temporal interactions that exist between crop physiology, soil status, and environmental stresses. Besides, the majority of the current practices do not have an autonomous decision-making approach to preventive intervention which leads to inefficient use of water and slows down the response to stress. This paper suggests a cognitive UAV-assisted agro-surveillance system to predict yield vulnerability caused by crop stress and optimize adaptive irrigation with the help of spatio-temporal deep and reinforcement learning. The framework combines UAV-obtained RGB and multispectral and thermal imagery with measurements of soil sensors and meteorological data obtained with the Crop Health and Environmental Stress Dataset. A new GeoSpatio-TRiNet model is used to acquire long-range spatial relationship, time stress development, and diffusion of stresses across agricultural regions. The model predicts the vulnerability trajectories of the stress instead of the direct yield regression, and this allows early detection of yield risk. Such predictions serve to generate a cognitive environmental state of a Soft ActorCritic (SAC) reinforcement learning agent that autonomously computes zone-based irrigation behaviors to reduce the recurrence of stress at the minimum water usage cost. As shown by the results of the experiment, the proposed framework has a stress forecasting accuracy of 96.3% and performs much better than the traditional machine learning, CNN-based, and transformer-based baselines. The system also decreases the predicted yield vulnerability by 46.6 and enhances water-use efficiency by 41.1 as compared to irrigation strategies based on rules. The results confirm the usefulness of spatio-temporal intelligence with predictive control in terms of effectiveness, and the proposed framework is a scalable and sustainable solution to precision agriculture of the next generation.