Predictive Irrigation Management Using Long Short-Term Memory Networks and IoT Data in Agriculture

The developed research includes an Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network with IoT sensor data for the management of rice crop irrigation. Optimizing the amount of water required for rice crops is very critical, based on real-time predictions of the actual environmental and soil parameters including moisture, temperature, humidity, and rainfall as well as all other possible related factors. IoT sensors installed in agricultural fields gathered data, which was transmitted to a controller and then uploaded to the cloud for further processing. The training dataset contained 5,600 records. In this research, 70% was used for training and the rest 30% for testing. Three LSTM models were used for analyzing sensor data and predicting the need for irrigation and controlling the irrigation pump accordingly. These were Vanilla LSTM, Stacked LSTM, and Bidirectional LSTM. It was evaluated the performance of the models developed using precision, recall, F1 score, accuracy, and other performance measures such as Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and R<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> Score. Bidirectional LSTM was determined to have the best performance, with MAE at 0.15, RMSE at 0.24, and an R2 score of 0.93, exhibiting high accuracy and predictive power. The Stacked LSTM and Vanilla LSTM also gave fair results, in terms of having R2 values of 0.89 and 0.84, respectively. The number of training and memory used for the computation were also given, with Vanilla LSTM taking least, followed by Stacked LSTM and Bidirectional LSTM. These results suggest that the LSTM networks can potentially be capable of improving the irrigation management such that more water is conserved and, subsequently, more suitable for agricultural productivity.