Recent advances in plant disease detection: challenges and opportunities

Plant diseases cause approximately 220 billion USD in annual agricultural losses, driving demand for automated detection systems. This systematic review analyzes deep learning approaches for plant disease detection using RGB and hyperspectral imaging, examining their evolution from classical image processing to modern neural architectures. We evaluate state-of-the-art models across 11 benchmark datasets, revealing significant performance gaps between laboratory conditions (95–99% accuracy) and field deployment (70–85% accuracy). Transformer-based architectures demonstrate superior robustness, with SWIN achieving 88% accuracy on real-world datasets compared to 53% for traditional CNNs. Our analysis identifies three critical deployment constraints: environmental variability sensitivity, economic barriers (500–2000 USD for RGB vs. 20,000–50,000 USD for hyperspectral systems), and interpretability requirements for farmer adoption. Case studies of successful platforms (Plantix with 10+ million users) highlight the importance of offline functionality and multilingual support. We establish evidence-based guidelines prioritizing deployment viability over laboratory optimization and identify key research directions including lightweight model design, cross-geographic generalization, and explainable multimodal fusion. This review provides a comprehensive framework for advancing plant disease detection from research prototypes to practical agricultural tools that can improve global food security.