Integration of IoT And Satellite Data for Real-Time Agricultural Crop Stress Monitoring Using Spatio-Temporal Transformers

This research work presents an integrated framework for real-time crop stress monitoring that combines ground-based Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and multi-temporal satellite remote sensing data. Due to growing environmental uncertainty and limited resources, the early identification of crop stress is crucial for maximizing agricultural productivity. IoT sensors yield localized, real-time measurements of key variables like soil moisture, temperature, and humidity, whereas satellite images yield wide-area vegetation and thermal indicators (e.g., NDVI, EVI, LST). The solution utilizes a Spatio-Temporal Transformer (ST-Transformer) model to integrate these heterogeneous data streams to make early crop disease and irrigation stress detection. By integrating spatial satellite imagery with temporal IoT sequences, STT leverages attention mechanisms to offer a more holistic analysis, which translates to an impressive accuracy of 88% and a solid F1-Score of 0.855. This dual capacity to concurrently handle spatial and temporal dimensions allows STT to effectively generalize across diverse crop stress categories, providing insights that are both timely and actionable