A Digital Twin Assisted Disease Detection for Leafy Green Vegetables Using Federated Learning in Smart Greenhouse

Abstract

Agricultural production is seriously vulnerable to the rapid evolution of plant diseases in greenhouse environment. In modern agriculture, ensuring timely and accurate disease detection in leafy green vegetables is crucial for improving crop yield and sustainability. The effects of environmental temperature, humidity on plant’s health which restricts the efficacy of current disease management techniques in greenhouses. This research presents a Digital Twin-assisted model for disease detection in lettuce plants, leveraging Federated-based Learning to enable privacy-preserving and distributed model training within a smart greenhouse environment. The study integrates five pre-trained models AlexNet, MobileNet, ResNet50, EfficientNetB3, and VGG16 to evaluate their effectiveness in classifying plant diseases. This study utilise a lettuce diseases dataset from Kaggle. Among the tested models, VGG16 achieved the highest accuracy of 98%, demonstrating its superior capability for disease classification in resource-constrained settings. Additionally, a correlation analysis between humidity, temperature and disease occurrence was conducted using Unity 3D and Microsoft Azure, providing deeper insights into the environmental conditions influencing plant health. The proposed model is useful for monitoring crops in real time and shows that combining Digital Twin technology with Federated-based Learning can improve decision-making in smart farming systems.