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Rice, the world's most extensively cultivated cereal crop, serves as a staple food and energy source for over half of the global population. A variety of abiotic and biotic factors such as weather conditions, soil quality, temperature, insects, pathogens, and viruses can greatly impact the quantity and quality of rice grains. Studies have established that plant infections have a significant impact on rice crops, resulting in substantial financial losses in agriculture. To accurately diagnose and manage the diseases affecting rice plants, plant pathologists are seeking efficient and reliable methods. Traditional disease detection techniques, employed by farmers, involve time-consuming visual inspections and result in inadequate farming practices. With advancements in agricultural technology, the identification of pathogenic organisms in rice plants has become significantly more manageable through techniques such as machine learning and deep learning, which are receiving significant attention in crop disease research. In this paper, we used the transfer learning approach on 15 pre-trained CNN models for the automatic identification of Rice leave diseases. Results showed that the InceptionV3 model is outperforming with an average accuracy of 99.64% with Precision, Recall, F1-Score, and Specificity as 98.23, 98.21, 98.20, and 99.80, and the AlexNet model resulted in poor performance with average accuracy of 97.35% among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fruit quality is an important aspect in determining the consumer preference in the supply chain. Thermal imaging was used to determine different pineapple varieties according to the physicochemical changes of the fruit by means of the deep learning method. Deep learning has gained attention in fruit classification and recognition in unimodal processing. This paper proposes a multimodal data fusion framework for the determination of pineapple quality using deep learning methods based on the feature extraction acquired from thermal imaging. Feature extraction was selected from the thermal images that provided a correlation with the quality attributes of the fruit in developing the deep learning models. Three different types of deep learning architectures, including ResNet, VGG16, and InceptionV3, were built to develop the multimodal data fusion framework for the classification of pineapple varieties based on the concatenation of multiple features extracted by the robust networks. The multimodal data fusion coupled with powerful convolutional neural network architectures can remarkably distinguish different pineapple varieties. The proposed multimodal data fusion framework provides a reliable determination of fruit quality that can improve the recognition accuracy and the model performance up to 0.9687. The effectiveness of multimodal deep learning data fusion and thermal imaging has huge potential in monitoring the real-time determination of physicochemical changes of fruit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to evaluate whether an automatic analysis with deep learning convolutional neural networks techniques offer the ability to efficiently identify olive groves with different intensification patterns by using very high-resolution aerial orthophotographs. First, a sub-image crop classification was carried out. To standardize the size and increase the number of samples of the data training (DT), the crop images were divided into mini-crops (sub-images) using segmentation techniques, which used a different threshold and stride size to consider the mini-crop as suitable for the analysis. The four scenarios evaluated discriminated the sub-images efficiently (accuracies higher than 0.8), obtaining the largest sub-images (H = 120, W = 120) for the highest average accuracy (0.957). The super-intensive olive plantings were the easiest to classify for most of the sub-image sizes. Nevertheless, although traditional olive groves were discriminated accurately, too, the most difficult task was to distinguish between the intensive plantings and the traditional ones. A second phase of the proposed system was to predict the crop at farm-level based on the most frequent class detected in the sub-images of each crop. The results obtained at farm level were slightly lower than at the sub-images level, reaching the highest accuracy (0.826) with an intermediate size image (H = 80, W = 80). Thus, the convolutional neural networks proposed made it possible to automate the classification and discriminate accurately among traditional, intensive, and super-intensive planting systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To apply weed control treatments effectively, the weeds must be accurately detected. Deep learning (DL) has been quite successful in performing the weed identification task. However, various aspects of the DL have not been explored in previous studies. This research aimed to achieve a high average precision (AP) of eight classes of weeds and a negative (non-weed) class, using the DeepWeeds dataset. In this regard, a DL-based two-step methodology has been proposed. This article is the second stage of the research, while the first stage has already been published. The former phase presented a weed detection pipeline and consisted of the evaluation of various neural networks, image resizers, and weight optimization techniques. Although a significant improvement in the mean average precision (mAP) was attained. However, the Chinee apple weed did not reach a high average precision. This result provided a solid ground for the next stage of the study. Hence, this paper presents an in-depth analysis of the Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) with ResNet-101, the best-obtained model in the past step. The architectural details of the Faster RCNN model have been thoroughly studied to investigate each class of weeds. It was empirically found that the generation of anchor boxes affects the training and testing performance of the Faster RCNN model. An enhancement to the anchor box scales and aspect ratios has been attempted by various combinations. The final results, with the addition of 64 × 64 scale size, and aspect ratio of 1:3 and 3:1, produced the best classification and localization of all classes of weeds and a negative class. An enhancement of 24.95% AP was obtained in Chinee apple weed. Furthermore, the mAP was improved by 2.58%. The robustness of the approach has been shown by the stratified k-fold cross-validation technique and testing on an external dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer vision is currently experiencing success in various domains due to the harnessing of deep learning strategies. In the case of precision agriculture, computer vision is being investigated for detecting fruits from orchards. However, such strategies limit too-high complexity computation that is impossible to embed in an automated device. Nevertheless, most investigation of fruit detection is limited to a single fruit, resulting in the necessity of a one-to-many object detection system. This paper introduces a generic detection mechanism named FruitDet, designed to be prominent for detecting fruits. The FruitDet architecture is designed on the YOLO pipeline and achieves better performance in detecting fruits than any other detection model. The backbone of the detection model is implemented using DenseNet architecture. Further, the FruitDet is packed with newer concepts: attentive pooling, bottleneck spatial pyramid pooling, and blackout mechanism. The detection mechanism is benchmarked using five datasets, which combines a total of eight different fruit classes. The FruitDet architecture acquires better performance than any other recognized detection methods in fruit detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the continuous growth of the global population and the increasing demand for crop yield, enhancing crop productivity has emerged as a crucial research objective on a global scale. Weeds, being one of the primary abiotic factors impacting crop yield, contribute to approximately 13.2% of annual food loss. In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology has developed rapidly and its maturity has led to widespread utilization in improving crop productivity and reducing management costs. Concurrently, deep learning technology has become a prominent tool in image recognition. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has achieved remarkable outcomes in various domains, including agriculture, such as weed detection, pest identification, plant/fruit counting, maturity grading, etc. This study provides an overview of the development of UAV platforms, the classification of UAV platforms and their advantages and disadvantages, as well as the types and characteristics of data collected by common vision sensors used in agriculture, and discusses the application of deep learning technology in weed detection. The manuscript presents current advancements in UAV technology and CNNs in weed management tasks while emphasizing the existing limitations and future trends in its development process to assist researchers working on applying deep learning techniques to weed management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Timely forecasting of aboveground vegetation biomass is crucial for effective management and ensuring food security. However, research on predicting aboveground biomass remains scarce. Artificial intelligence (AI) methods could bridge this research gap and provide early warning to planners and stakeholders. This study evaluates the effectiveness of deep learning (DL) algorithms in predicting aboveground vegetation biomass with limited-size data. It employs an iterative forecasting procedure for four target horizons, comparing the performance of DL models—multi-layer perceptron (MLP), long short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent unit (GRU), convolutional neural network (CNN), and CNN-LSTM—against the traditional seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model, serving as a benchmark. Five limited-size vegetation biomass time series from Kenyan grasslands with values at 15-day intervals over a 20-year period were chosen for this purpose. Comparing the outcomes of these models revealed significant differences (p < 0.05); however, none of the models proved superior among the five time series and the four horizons evaluated. The SARIMA, CNN, and CNN-LSTM models performed best, with the statistical model slightly outperforming the other two. Additionally, the accuracy of all five models varied significantly according to the prediction horizon (p < 0.05). As expected, the accuracy of the models decreased as the prediction horizon increased, although this relationship was not strictly monotonic. Finally, this study indicated that, in limited-size aboveground vegetation biomass time series, there is no guarantee that deep learning methods will outperform traditional statistical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invasive plant species pose significant biodiversity and ecosystem threats. Real-time identification of invasive plants is a crucial prerequisite for early and timely prevention. While deep learning has shown promising results in plant recognition, the use of deep learning models often involve a large number of parameters and high data requirements for training. Unfortunately, the available data for various invasive plant species are often limited. To address this challenge, this study proposes a lightweight deep learning model called IPMCNet for the identification of multiple invasive plant species. IPMCNet attains high recognition accuracy even with limited data and exhibits strong generalizability. Simultaneously, by employing depth-wise separable convolutional kernels, splitting channels, and eliminating fully connected layer, the model's parameter count is lower than that of some existing lightweight models. Additionally, the study explores the impact of different loss functions, and the insertion of various attention modules on the model's accuracy. The experimental results reveal that, compared with eight other existing neural network models, IPMCNet achieves the highest classification accuracy of 94.52%. Furthermore, the findings suggest that focal loss is the most effective loss function. The performance of the six attention modules is suboptimal, and their insertion leads to a decrease in model accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning excels in the identification of specific plant diseases. However, dealing with multi-domain datasets, which encompass a variety of categories, presents challenges due to limited data availability. (1) Background: In real-world scenarios, data distribution is uneven, the scale continues to grow, new categories emerge, and a phenomenon known as 'catastrophic forgetting' occurs. Models rely on a substantial amount of data for labeling and training. (2) Methods: We introduce a two-stage approach. The first stage is the scalable feature learning phase, where the previous feature representation is fixed. Through a new feature extractor, incoming and stored data are trained to expand features. In the second stage, by introducing an auxiliary loss to determine whether key parameters are retained, we reduce the instability of weight parameters. This maintains the separability of old features and encourages the model to learn new concepts, diversity, and discriminative features. (3) Results: Our findings indicate that when the data landscape shifts, recognition accuracy in multi-task continual learning, leveraging the simultaneous availability of datasets, significantly outperforms single convolutional networks and multi-task learning models. (4) Conclusions: Our method advances continual learning towards practical applications. It is particularly effective in mitigating catastrophic forgetting in multi-domain datasets and enhancing the robustness of deep-learning models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Winter jujube (Ziziphus jujuba Mill. cv. Dongzao) has been cultivated in China for a long time and has a richly abundant history, whose maturity grade determined different postharvest qualities. Traditional methods for identifying the fundamental quality of winter jujube are known to be time-consuming and labor-intensive, resulting in significant difficulties for winter jujube resource management. The applications of deep learning in this regard will help manufacturers and orchard workers quickly identify fundamental quality information. In our study, the best fundamental quality of winter jujube from the correlation between maturity and fundamental quality was determined by testing three simple physicochemical indexes: total soluble solids (TSS), total acid (TA) and puncture force of fruit at five maturity stages which classified by the color and appearance. The results showed that the fully red fruits (the 4th grade) had the optimal eating quality parameter. Additionally, five different maturity grades of winter jujube were photographed as datasets and used the ResNet-50 model and the iResNet-50 model for training. And the iResNet-50 model was improved to overlap double residuals in the first Main Stage, with an accuracy of 98.35%, a precision of 98.40%, a recall of 98.35%, and a F1 score of 98.36%, which provided an important basis for automatic fundamental quality detection of winter jujube. This study provided ideas for fundamental quality classification of winter jujube during harvesting, fundamental quality screening of winter jujube in assembly line production, and real-time monitoring of winter jujube during transportation and storage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Farm-scale crop yield prediction is a natural development of sustainable agriculture, producing a rich amount of food without depleting and polluting environmental resources. Recent studies on crop yield production are limited to regional-scale predictions. The regional-scale crop yield predictions usually face challenges in capturing local yield variations based on farm management decisions and the condition of the field. For this research, we identified the need to create a large and reusable farm-scale crop yield production dataset, which could provide precise farm-scale ground-truth prediction targets. Therefore, we utilise multi-temporal data, such as Sentinel-2 satellite images, weather data, farm data, grain delivery data, and cadastre-specific data. We introduce a deep hybrid neural network model to train this multi-temporal data. This model combines the features of convolutional layers and recurrent neural networks to predict farm-scale crop yield production across Norway. The proposed model could efficiently make the target predictions with the mean absolute error of 76 kg per 1000 m2. In conclusion, the reusable farm-scale multi-temporal crop yield dataset and the proposed novel model could meet the actual requirements for the prediction targets in this paper, providing further valuable insights for the research community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identification of tomato leaf diseases is easily affected by complex backgrounds, small differences between different diseases, and large differences between the same diseases. Therefore, we propose a novel classification network for tomato leaf disease, the Dense Inception MobileNet-V2 parallel convolutional block attention module network (DIMPCNET). To begin, we collected a total of 1256 original images of 5 tomato leaf diseases and expanded them to 8190 using data enhancement techniques. Next, an improved bilateral filtering and threshold function (IBFTF) algorithm is designed to effectively remove noise. Then, the Dense Inception convolutional neural network module (DI) was designed to alleviate the problem of large intra-class differences and small inter-class differences. Then, a parallel convolutional block attention module (PCBAM) was added to MobileNet-V2 to reduce the impact of complex backgrounds. Finally, the experimental results show that the recognition accuracy and F1-score obtained by DIMPCNET are 94.44% and 0.9475. The loss is approximately 0.28%. This method is the most advanced and provides a new idea for the identification of crop diseases, such as tomatoes, and the development of smart agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wheat stripe rust-damaged leaves present challenges to automatic disease index calculation, including high similarity between spores and spots, and difficulty in distinguishing edge contours. In actual field applications, investigators rely on the naked eye to judge the disease extent, which is subjective, of low accuracy, and essentially qualitative. To address the above issues, this study undertook a task of semantic segmentation of wheat stripe rust damage images using deep learning. To address the problem of small available datasets, the first large-scale open dataset of wheat stripe rust images from Qinghai province was constructed through field and greenhouse image acquisition, screening, filtering, and manual annotation. There were 33,238 images in our dataset with a size of 512 × 512 pixels. A new segmentation paradigm was defined. Dividing indistinguishable spores and spots into different classes, the task of accurate segmentation of the background, leaf (containing spots), and spores was investigated. To assign different weights to high- and low-frequency features, we used the Octave-UNet model that replaces the original convolutional operation with the octave convolution in the U-Net model. The Octave-UNet model obtained the best benchmark results among four models (PSPNet, DeepLabv3, U-Net, Octave-UNet), the mean intersection over a union of the Octave-UNet model was 83.44%, the mean pixel accuracy was 94.58%, and the accuracy was 96.06%, respectively. The results showed that the state-of-art Octave-UNet model can better represent and discern the semantic information over a small region and improve the segmentation accuracy of spores, leaves, and backgrounds in our constructed dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning with convolutional neural networks represents the most used approach in recent years in the classification of leaves' diseases. The literature has extensively addressed the problem using laboratory-acquired datasets with a homogeneous background. In this article, we explore the variability factors that influence the classification of plant diseases by analyzing the same plant and disease under different conditions, i.e., in the field and in the laboratory. Two plant species and five biotic stresses are analyzed using different architectures, such as EfficientB0, MobileNetV2, InceptionV2, ResNet50 and VGG16. Experiments show that model performance drops drastically when using representative datasets, and the features learned from the network to determine the class do not always belong to the leaf lesion. In the worst case, the accuracy drops from 92.67% to 54.41%. Our results indicate that while deep learning is an effective technique, there are some technical issues to consider when applying it to more representative datasets collected in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Taiwan, mushrooms are an agricultural product with high nutritional value and economic benefit. However, global warming and climate change have affected plant quality. As a result, technological greenhouses are replacing traditional tin houses as locations for mushroom planting. These greenhouses feature several complex parameters. If we can reduce the complexity such greenhouses and improve the efficiency of their production management using intelligent schemes, technological greenhouses could become the expert assistants of farmers. In this paper, the main goal of the developed system is to measure the mushroom size and to count the amount of mushrooms. According to the results of each measurement, the growth rate of the mushrooms can be estimated. The proposed system also records the data of the mushrooms and broadcasts them to the mobile phone of the farmer. This improves the effectiveness of the production management. The proposed system is based on the convolutional neural network of deep learning, which is used to localize the mushrooms in the image. A positioning correction method is also proposed to modify the localization result. The experiments show that the proposed system has a good performance concerning the image measurement of mushrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various plant diseases are major threats to agriculture. For timely control of different plant diseases in effective manner, automated identification of diseases are highly beneficial. So far, different techniques have been used to identify the diseases in plants. Deep learning is among the most widely used techniques in recent times due to its impressive results. In this work, we have proposed two methods namely shallow VGG with RF and shallow VGG with Xgboost to identify the diseases. The proposed model is compared with other hand-crafted and deep learning-based approaches. The experiments are carried on three different plants namely corn, potato, and tomato. The considered diseases in corns are Blight, Common rust, and Gray leaf spot, diseases in potatoes are early blight and late blight, and tomato diseases are bacterial spot, early blight, and late blight. The result shows that our implemented shallow VGG with Xgboost model outperforms different deep learning models in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, and specificity. Shallow Visual Geometric Group (VGG) with Xgboost gives the highest accuracy rate of 94.47% in corn, 98.74% in potato, and 93.91% in the tomato dataset. The models are also tested with field images of potato, corn, and tomato. Even in field image the average accuracy obtained using shallow VGG with Xgboost are 94.22%, 97.36%, and 93.14%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]