A Low-Cost UAV Deep Learning Pipeline for Integrated Apple Disease Diagnosis,Freshness Assessment, and Fruit Detection

Abstract

Apple orchards require timely disease detection, fruit quality assessment, and yield estimation, yet existing UAV-based systems address such tasks in isolation and often rely on costly multispectral sensors. This paper presents a unified, low-cost RGB-only UAV-based orchard intelligent pipeline integrating ResNet50 for leaf disease detection, VGG 16 for apple freshness determination, and YOLOv8 for real-time apple detection and localization. The system runs on an ESP32-CAM and Raspberry Pi, providing fully offline on-site inference without cloud support. Experiments demonstrate 98.9% accuracy for leaf disease classification, 97.4% accuracy for freshness classification, and 0.857 F1 score for apple detection. The framework provides an accessible and scalable alternative to multispectral UAV solutions, supporting practical precision agriculture on affordable hardware.