An Automated Information Processing Framework for UAV-Based Detection and Spatial Mapping of Crop Damage Using Deep Learning

The early detection and spatial characterization of crop damage are critical for improving decision-making in precision agriculture, particularly in regions where traditional monitoring methods are limited in scalability and objectivity. This study presents an integrated information processing framework that couples UAV-based image acquisition, instance segmentation, slicing-aided inference of large orthomosaics, and georeferenced spatial analysis into a single reproducible pipeline for the detection and mapping of crop damage. The framework is applied to maize cultivated under traditional milpa systems in Yucatán, Mexico, a region characterized by intercropping, irregular plant spacing, and complex backgrounds rarely represented in mainstream agricultural deep learning benchmarks. High-resolution RGB images were systematically acquired over maize fields in Yucatán, Mexico, and curated into specialized datasets representing parcels, individual plants, and damaged vegetation. Instance segmentation models based on the YOLOv11 architecture were trained and evaluated to extract visual information related to crop condition, while the Slicing-Aided Hyper Inference (SAHI) method was integrated to enable efficient processing of large orthomosaic images. The proposed framework achieved high performance in detecting maize plants, with a precision of 92.9% and an mAP50 of 94.2%, and demonstrated reliable identification of damage patterns associated with Spodoptera frugiperda, reaching a precision of 79.2% and an mAP50 of 71.7%. The resulting georeferenced outputs provide spatially explicit information that supports quantitative analysis of crop health and damage distribution. The results indicate that the proposed framework constitutes a scalable and reproducible approach for UAV-based visual information extraction, with potential applicability to broader agricultural monitoring and data-driven decision support systems.