AgriSentinel: Privacy-Enhanced Embedded-LLM Crop Disease Alerting System

Abstract

Crop diseases pose significant threats to global food security, agricultural productivity, and sustainable farming practices, directly affecting farmers' livelihoods and economic stability. To address the growing need for effective crop disease management, AI-based disease alerting systems have emerged as promising tools by providing early detection and actionable insights for timely intervention. However, existing systems often overlook critical aspects such as data privacy, market pricing power, and farmer-friendly usability, leaving farmers vulnerable to privacy breaches and economic exploitation. To bridge these gaps, we propose AgriSentinel, the first Privacy-Enhanced Embedded-LLM Crop Disease Alerting System. AgriSentinel incorporates a differential privacy mechanism to protect sensitive crop image data while maintaining classification accuracy. Its lightweight deep learning-based crop disease classification model is optimized for mobile devices, ensuring accessibility and usability for farmers. Additionally, the system includes a fine-tuned, on-device large language model (LLM) that leverages a curated knowledge pool to provide farmers with specific, actionable suggestions for managing crop diseases, going beyond simple alerting. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of AgriSentinel, demonstrating its ability to safeguard data privacy, maintain high classification performance, and deliver practical, actionable disease management strategies. AgriSentinel offers a robust, farmer-friendly solution for automating crop disease alerting and management, ultimately contributing to improved agricultural decision-making and enhanced crop productivity.