Distributed Deep Learning in IoT Sensor Network for the Diagnosis of Plant Diseases

The early detection of plant diseases is critical to improving agricultural productivity and ensuring food security. However, conventional centralized deep learning approaches are often unsuitable for large-scale agricultural deployments, as they rely on continuous data transmission to cloud servers and require high computational resources that are impractical for Internet of Things (IoT)-based field environments. In this article, we present a distributed deep learning framework based on Federated Learning (FL) for the diagnosis of plant diseases in IoT sensor networks. The proposed architecture integrates multiple IoT nodes and an edge computing node that collaboratively train an EfficientNet B0 model using the Federated Averaging (FedAvg) algorithm without transferring local data. Two training pipelines are evaluated: a standard single-model pipeline and a hierarchical pipeline that combines a crop classifier with crop-specific disease models. Experimental results on a multicrop leaf image dataset under realistic augmentation scenarios demonstrate that the hierarchical FL approach improves per-crop classification accuracy and robustness to environmental variations, while the standard pipeline offers lower latency and energy consumption.