Deep learning based computer vision approaches for smart agricultural applications

The agriculture industry is undergoing a rapid digital transformation and is growing powerful by the pillars of cutting-edge approaches like artificial intelligence and allied technologies. At the core of artificial intelligence, deep learning-based computer vision enables various agriculture activities to be performed automatically with utmost precision enabling smart agriculture into reality. Computer vision techniques, in conjunction with high-quality image acquisition using remote cameras, enable non-contact and efficient technology-driven solutions in agriculture. This review contributes to providing state-of-the-art computer vision technologies based on deep learning that can assist farmers in operations starting from land preparation to harvesting operations. Recent works in the area of computer vision were analyzed in this paper and categorized into (a) seed quality analysis, (b) soil analysis, (c) irrigation water management, (d) plant health analysis, (e) weed management (f) livestock management and (g) yield estimation. The paper also discusses recent trends in computer vision such as generative adversarial networks (GAN), vision transformers (ViT) and other popular deep learning architectures. Additionally, this study pinpoints the challenges in implementing the solutions in the farmer’s field in real-time. The overall finding indicates that convolutional neural networks are the corner stone of modern computer vision approaches and their various architectures provide high-quality solutions across various agriculture activities in terms of precision and accuracy. However, the success of the computer vision approach lies in building the model on a quality dataset and providing real-time solutions.