From Seedling to Maturity: AI‐Based Mustard Crop Growth Tracking Using UAV Time‐Series Images

ABSTRACT

Accurate monitoring of plant phenology is essential for agricultural decision‐making, as deciding the right time of fertilizer application, the maturity of the plant, and climate variation. Traditional manual monitoring often fails to capture the temporal variations across large fields. UAV‐based imaging combined with deep learning can provide a solution for automated phenological assessment. In this study, we propose an AI‐driven framework on UAV‐captured Indian mustard plants to predict the phenological progress. We applied deep learning methods, EfficientNet‐B0, and a proposed hybrid model of a Vision Transformer + LSTM to predict phenological growth from UVV‐captured images of the Indian mustard plant. Both models were trained under a supervised regression setup with extensive augmentation and optimization strategies. The results of the study show that the ViT + LSTM outperforms the EfficientNet‐B0 model in terms of prediction accuracy for mustard plant phenology. The R ²  = 0.9974, minimal errors MSE = 0.0111, and RMSE = 0.149 indicate that the ViT + LSTM provides more accurate phenological predictions on temporal and spatial dependencies. Correlation Analysis confirmed a strong linear and monotonic relationship with the ground truth, with r  = 0.9989 and ρ  = 0.9946. Gram‐CAM visualization showed that the ViT + LSTM captures the meaning area of the plant. These results were further validated using statistical measures such as Pearson's r and Spearman's ρ , which confirmed the reliability and consistency of the model's predictions.