Plant diseases remain a major threat to global food production, causing significant yield losses and economic impact worldwide. Early and precise disease detection is crucial for effective crop management, yet conventional diagnostic approaches are often slow, labor-intensive, and rely on specialized expertise that may not be widely accessible. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly deep learning–based image analysis, offer scalable and automated solutions for plant disease recognition. This review critically examines forty-one peer-reviewed studies published between 2008 and 2025, selected following PRISMA guidelines from major scientific databases. We summarize key methodological developments, including convolutional neural networks, vision transformers, transfer and few-shot learning, and multimodal sensing approaches, highlighting their reported performance and limitations. Although many models achieve high accuracy in controlled datasets, their effectiveness often decreases under real-field conditions due to environmental variability, limited training data, and practical deployment constraints. We discuss existing challenges and propose future research directions, emphasizing improved robustness in field environments, development of lightweight and explainable models suitable for edge deployment, and integration with precision agriculture systems. This review aims to guide the design of reliable, practical, and scalable AI-driven plant disease detection strategies.
Ghimire et al. (2026) studied this question.