Intelligent Automated Crop Monitoring System Based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Deep Learning for Smart Agriculture

The rapid development of precision agriculture technologies requires intelligent systems capable of automatically analyzing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery and transforming image-processing results into structured information for crop-monitoring decision support. This study develops and computationally validates an integrated framework combining deep learning-based semantic segmentation, RGB-based spatial interpretation, image-space vectorization of candidate RGB heterogeneity zones, and monitoring-priority assessment. Experimental validation was performed using the open-access dataset “High-Resolution RGB Images and Corresponding Masks of Agricultural Fields”, comprising mixed agricultural vegetation scenes. Following data-integrity verification, 326 valid RGB image–reference mask pairs were retained and divided into 21,324 non-overlapping 512 × 512-pixel patches. U-Net-ResNet50, DeepLabV3-ResNet50, and FCN-ResNet50 were evaluated in three repeated source-image-grouped holdout experiments using the full dataset. U-Net-ResNet50 achieved the highest held-out performance, with mean Precision = 0.9946 ± 0.0008, Recall = 0.9931 ± 0.0021, vegetation IoU = 0.9877 ± 0.0020, and Dice = 0.9938 ± 0.0010, and was therefore selected for subsequent spatial analysis. Its segmentation outputs were combined with VARI, ExG, and GLI indices to identify candidate RGB heterogeneity zones, which were converted into image-space vector objects in source-image pixel coordinates. The revised full-data analysis generated 58,206 candidate RGB heterogeneity zones. These regions represent visible canopy heterogeneity rather than physiologically confirmed crop stress and are intended to support targeted field verification and monitoring prioritization. The results demonstrate the feasibility of an end-to-end UAV RGB processing workflow that transforms pixel-level segmentation outputs into structured spatial information for precision-agriculture monitoring and decision support.