Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

Accurate crop health monitoring is not only essential for improving agricultural efficiency but also for ensuring sustainable food production in the face of environmental challenges. Traditional approaches often rely on visual inspection or simple NDVI measurements, which, though useful, fall short in detecting nuanced variations in crop stress and disease conditions. In this research, we propose a more sophisticated method that leverages NDVI data combined with a Fully Connected Neural Network (FCNN) to classify crop health with greater precision. The FCNN, trained using satellite imagery from various agricultural regions, is capable of identifying subtle distinctions between healthy crops, rust-affected plants, and other stressed conditions. Our approach not only achieved a remarkable classification accuracy of 97.80% but it also significantly outperformed conventional models in terms of precision, recall, and F1-scores. The ability to map the relationship between NDVI values and crop health using deep learning presents new opportunities for real-time, large-scale monitoring of agricultural fields, reducing manual efforts, and offering a scalable solution to address global food security.