International Journal of Agriculture Extension and Social Development
Quantum AI-driven precision soil health monitoring and automated crop disease detection using advanced analytical models
Asma Fayaz, Madhav Kapoor
Abstract
The need for accuracy and scalability is imperative when it comes to monitoring soil health and detecting plant diseases using precision agriculture. This paper suggests a Quantum AI-based hybrid analytics approach that combines classical machine learning algorithms, Variational Quantum Circuits, and statistics modeling in order to provide improved agricultural decision making capabilities. For this purpose, we used the multi-modal datasets that include Soil Health Data set (Kaggle dataset, n=12,500) that contains soil pH, moisture, Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), Potassium (K) information and PlantVillage dataset (54,306 leaf images from 38 classes). This paper proposes a hybrid framework of QSVM and QCNN to predict soil health status and detect crop diseases in a dataset. This research work has been experimentally evaluated with Qiskit simulator (8 qubits) and classical ML algorithms like Random Forest and CNN. Based on experimental results, it is clear that the proposed hybrid framework yields soil health prediction accuracy of 94.7%, which is better than classical ML approaches (88.3%). Further, the accuracy achieved by the QCNN framework for predicting crop disease is 97.2%, with precision, recall, and F1-score being 0.96, 0.97, and 0.965, respectively. It is observed that the computation time is reduced by around 21.4% in feature selection tasks. From the above discussion, it can be concluded that this paper explores the capability of Quantum Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide timely assistance for precision farming applications.