Abstract
Crop pests are to blame for significant economic, social, and environmental losses worldwide. Various pests have different control strategies, and precisely identifying pests has become crucial to pest control and is a significant difficulty in agriculture. Many agricultural professionals are interested in deep learning (DL) models since they have shown significant promise in image recognition. Pest identification approaches in literature have relatively low accuracy in pest recognition and classification due to the complexity of their algorithms and limited data availability. Misclassification of insect pests sometimes leads to using the wrong pesticides, causing harm to agricultural yields and the surrounding environment. It necessitates developing an automated system capable of more accurate pest identification and classification. This paper presents a novel end-to-end DeepPestNet framework for pest recognition and classification. The proposed model has 11 learnable layers, including eight convolutional and three fully connected (FC) layers. We used image rotations techniques to increase the size of the dataset and image augmentations techniques to test the generalizability of the proposed DeepPestNet approach. We used the popular Deng's crops data set to assess the proposed DeepPestNet framework. We used the proposed method to recognize and classify crop pests into 10-class pests, i.e., Locusta migratoria, Euproctis pseudoconspersa strand, chrysochus Chinensis, empoasca flavescens, Spodoptera exigua, larva of laspeyresia pomonella, parasa lepida, acrida cinerea, larva of S. exigua, and L.pomonella types of insects pests. The proposed method achieved optimal accuracy of 100%. We compared the proposed DeepPestNet approach with traditional pre-trained deep learning (DL) models. To verify the general adaptability of this model, we tested the proposed model on the standard Kaggle dataset "Pest Dataset" to recognize nine types of pests: aphids, armyworm, beetle, bollworm, grasshopper, mites, mosquito, sawfly, and stem borer and achieved an accuracy of 98.92%. The proposed model can provide specialists and farmers with immediate and effective aid in recognizing pests, potentially reducing economic and crop yield losses.