Computer vision technology in agricultural automation —A review

Computer vision is a field that involves making a machine “see”. This technology uses a camera and computer instead of the human eye to identify, track and measure targets for further image processing. With the development of computer vision, such technology has been widely used in the field of agricultural automation and plays a key role in its development. This review systematically summarizes and analyzes the technologies and challenges over the past three years and explores future opportunities and prospects to form the latest reference for researchers. Through the analyses, it is found that the existing technology can help the development of agricultural automation for small field farming to achieve the advantages of low cost, high efficiency and high precision. However, there are still major challenges. First, the technology will continue to expand into new application areas in the future, and there will be more technological issues that need to be overcome. It is essential to build large-scale data sets. Second, with the rapid development of agricultural automation, the demand for professionals will continue to grow. Finally, the robust performance of related technologies in various complex environments will also face challenges. Through analysis and discussion, we believe that in the future, computer vision technology will be combined with intelligent technology such as deep learning technology, be applied to every aspect of agricultural production management based on large-scale datasets, be more widely used to solve the current agricultural problems, and better improve the economic, general and robust performance of agricultural automation systems, thus promoting the development of agricultural automation equipment and systems in a more intelligent direction.