Crop Pest Classification Using Deep Learning Techniques: A Review
It addresses the problem of slow and manual pest monitoring for agriculture, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing research without introducing new methods.
This review examines 37 studies from 2018 to 2025 on using deep learning techniques like CNNs and vision transformers for automating crop pest classification, highlighting a shift toward hybrid and transformer-based models that improve accuracy and contextual understanding.
Insect pests continue to bring a serious threat to crop yields around the world, and traditional methods for monitoring them are often slow, manual, and difficult to scale. In recent years, deep learning has emerged as a powerful solution, with techniques like convolutional neural networks (CNNs), vision transformers (ViTs), and hybrid models gaining popularity for automating pest detection. This review looks at 37 carefully selected studies published between 2018 and 2025, all focused on AI-based pest classification. The selected research is organized by crop type, pest species, model architecture, dataset usage, and key technical challenges. The early studies relied heavily on CNNs but latest work is shifting toward hybrid and transformer-based models that deliver higher accuracy and better contextual understanding. Still, challenges like imbalanced datasets, difficulty in detecting small pests, limited generalizability, and deployment on edge devices remain significant hurdles. Overall, this review offers a structured overview of the field, highlights useful datasets, and outlines the key challenges and future directions for AI-based pest monitoring systems.