Effectiveness of IoT and Deep Learning for Detection and Severity Assessment of Postelectrotermes militaris in Tea Plantations
Tea plantations are vulnerable to Postelectrotermes militaris, commonly known as the Upcountry Live Wood Termite (ULWT), which can cause substantial damage when infestations remain undetected. This study proposes an IoT-enabled acoustic monitoring framework integrated with deep learning for early detection and severity assessment of ULWT infestations in tea plantations. Research Method: Audio signals were captured non-invasively from tea trunks using a high-sensitivity microphone connected to a Raspberry Pi-based IoT device, with geographic coordinates recorded for spatial tracking. After trimming, resampling, and segmentation, 2,000 ten-second samples were obtained, comprising 1,000 healthy and 1,000 infested samples, and divided into 1,600 training, 200 validation, and 200 test samples. The dataset used in this study is publicly available on Kaggle (Senevirathna et al. 2026). Fourier-derived spectrograms trained a CNN for infestation classification and probability estimation. A weighted severity model combined CNN probability, mean acoustic amplitude, and nearby infested plants within 5 m, with geospatial mapping used to visualize infestation distribution. Findings and Values: Field trials in a ULWT-affected tea plantation in Pundaluoya demonstrated feasibility under realistic environmental noise. On the held-out test set, the CNN achieved 81.5% accuracy, 80.6% precision, 83.0% recall, 81.8% F1-score, and 0.819 ROC-AUC. Beyond binary infestation detection, the framework introduced quantitative severity assessment using infestation probability, acoustic amplitude, and nearby infested plants. The resulting severity and geospatial outputs can support plantation managers in identifying high-risk areas, prioritizing field inspections, and implementing more timely and targeted control measures.