Abstract

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, UAV remote sensing, and agricultural Internet of Things technologies, crop growth monitoring is evolving from manual inspection and single-source analysis toward intelligent decision-making based on multisource perception. However, existing methods still suffer from limited robustness under environmental variations, insufficient integration between UAV imagery and sparse ground sensor observations, and weak capability for transforming predictions into practical agricultural management recommendations. This study proposes a UAV–ground sensor collaborative lightweight framework for crop growth assessment and agricultural decision support. The proposed framework integrates UAV RGB and multispectral imagery with ground sensor observations through a region-level aerial–ground alignment mechanism and a sensor-guided attention fusion module, enabling environmental conditions to enhance visual feature interpretation. Furthermore, a fact-constrained decision module is developed to generate management recommendations based on crop status, environmental risks, and field information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance in crop growth classification and yield-trend prediction, reaching Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1-score values of 92.47%, 91.86%, 91.39%, and 91.62%, respectively, with an RMSE of 0.381 and an R2 of 0.902. The lightweight framework requires only 6.18M parameters and 0.91G FLOPs, achieving 39.56 ms inference latency and 25.28 FPS on edge devices. The proposed framework also improves decision reliability, achieving an expert agreement rate of 89.34% and a risk identification accuracy of 90.18%. Economic analysis indicates that the proposed framework reduces labor cost, water consumption, and fertilizer input by 49.7%, 26.7%, and 23.0%, respectively, while increasing net benefit by 46.1% compared with conventional field management practices. These results demonstrate that the proposed method provides an accurate, interpretable, and deployable AI-driven solution for intelligent crop management in smallholder and medium-sized farming systems.

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