Agriculture provides for the most basic needs of humankind: food and fiber. The introduction of new farming techniques in the past century (e.g., during the Green Revolution) has helped agriculture keep pace with growing demands for food and other agricultural products. However, further increases in food demand, a growing population, and rising income levels are likely to put additional strain on natural resources. With growing recognition of the negative impacts of agriculture on the environment, new techniques and approaches should be able to meet future food demands while maintaining or reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture. Emerging technologies, such as geospatial technologies, Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data analysis, and artificial intelligence (AI), could be utilized to make informed management decisions aimed to increase crop production. Precision agriculture (PA) entails the application of a suite of such technologies to optimize agricultural inputs to increase agricultural production and reduce input losses. Use of remote sensing technologies for PA has increased rapidly during the past few decades. The unprecedented availability of high resolution (spatial, spectral and temporal) satellite images has promoted the use of remote sensing in many PA applications, including crop monitoring, irrigation management, nutrient application, disease and pest management, and yield prediction. In this paper, we provide an overview of remote sensing systems, techniques, and vegetation indices along with their recent (2015–2020) applications in PA. Remote-sensing-based PA technologies such as variable fertilizer rate application technology in Green Seeker and Crop Circle have already been incorporated in commercial agriculture. Use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increased tremendously during the last decade due to their cost-effectiveness and flexibility in obtaining the high-resolution (cm-scale) images needed for PA applications. At the same time, the availability of a large amount of satellite data has prompted researchers to explore advanced data storage and processing techniques such as cloud computing and machine learning. Given the complexity of image processing and the amount of technical knowledge and expertise needed, it is critical to explore and develop a simple yet reliable workflow for the real-time application of remote sensing in PA. Development of accurate yet easy to use, user-friendly systems is likely to result in broader adoption of remote sensing technologies in commercial and non-commercial PA applications.

Applications of Remote Sensing in Precision Agriculture: A Review

Agriculture plays a significant role in the economic sector. The automation in agriculture is the main concern and the emerging subject across the world. The population is increasing tremendously and with this increase the demand of food and employment is also increasing. The traditional methods which were used by the farmers, were not sufficient enough to fulfill these requirements. Thus, new automated methods were introduced. These new methods satisfied the food requirements and also provided employment opportunities to billions of people. Artificial Intelligence in agriculture has brought an agriculture revolution. This technology has protected the crop yield from various factors like the climate changes, population growth, employment issues and the food security problems. This main concern of this paper is to audit the various applications of Artificial intelligence in agriculture such as for irrigation, weeding, spraying with the help of sensors and other means embedded in robots and drones. These technologies saves the excess use of water, pesticides, herbicides, maintains the fertility of the soil, also helps in the efficient use of man power and elevate the productivity and improve the quality. This paper surveys the work of many researchers to get a brief overview about the current implementation of automation in agriculture, the weeding systems through the robots and drones. The various soil water sensing methods are discussed along with two automated weeding techniques. The implementation of drones is discussed, the various methods used by drones for spraying and crop-monitoring is also discussed in this paper.

Implementation of artificial intelligence in agriculture for optimisation of irrigation and application of pesticides and herbicides

Water management is paramount in countries with water scarcity. This also affects agriculture, as a large amount of water is dedicated to that use. The possible consequences of global warming lead to the consideration of creating water adaptation measures to ensure the availability of water for food production and consumption. Thus, studies aimed at saving water usage in the irrigation process have increased over the years. Typical commercial sensors for agriculture irrigation systems are very expensive, making it impossible for smaller farmers to implement this type of system. However, manufacturers are currently offering low-cost sensors that can be connected to nodes to implement affordable systems for irrigation management and agriculture monitoring. Due to the recent advances in IoT and WSN technologies that can be applied in the development of these systems, we present a survey aimed at summarizing the current state of the art regarding smart irrigation systems. We determine the parameters that are monitored in irrigation systems regarding water quantity and quality, soil characteristics and weather conditions. We provide an overview of the most utilized nodes and wireless technologies. Lastly, we will discuss the challenges and the best practices for the implementation of sensor-based irrigation systems.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/4/1042/pdf

IoT-Based Smart Irrigation Systems: An Overview on the Recent Trends on Sensors and IoT Systems for Irrigation in Precision Agriculture

This paper presents a comprehensive review of emerging technologies for the internet of things (IoT)-based smart agriculture. We begin by summarizing the existing surveys and describing emergent technologies for the agricultural IoT, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, wireless technologies, open-source IoT platforms, software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV) technologies, cloud/fog computing, and middleware platforms. We also provide a classification of IoT applications for smart agriculture into seven categories: including smart monitoring, smart water management, agrochemicals applications, disease management, smart harvesting, supply chain management, and smart agricultural practices. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward supply chain management based on the blockchain technology for agricultural IoTs. Furthermore, we present real projects that use most of the aforementioned technologies, which demonstrate their great performance in the field of smart agriculture. Finally, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions for agricultural IoTs.

Internet of Things for the Future of Smart Agriculture: A Comprehensive Survey of Emerging Technologies

In the current generation, a huge amount of textual documents are generated and there is an urgent need to organize them in a proper structure so that classification can be performed and categories can be properly defined. The key technology for gaining the insights into a text information and organizing that information is known as text classification. The classes are then classified by determining the text types of the content. Based on different machine learning algorithms used in the current paper, the system of text classification is divided into four sections namely text pre-treatment, text representation, implementation of the classifier and classification. In this paper, a BBC news text classification system is designed. In the classifier implementation section, the authors separately chose and compared logistic regression, random forest and K-nearest neighbour as our classification algorithms. Then, these classifiers were tested, analysed and compared with each other and finally got a conclusion. The experimental conclusion shows that BBC news text classification model gets satisfying results on the basis of algorithms tested on the data set. The authors decided to show the comparison based on five parameters namely precision, accuracy, F1-score, support and confusion matrix. The classifier which gets the highest among all these parameters is termed as the best machine learning algorithm for the BBC news data set.

A Comparative Analysis of Logistic Regression, Random Forest and KNN Models for the Text Classification

Agriculture automation is the main concern and emerging subject for every country. The world population is increasing at a very fast rate and with increase in population the need for food increases briskly. Traditional methods used by farmers aren't sufficient enough to serve the increasing demand and so they have to hamper the soil by using harmful pesticides in an intensified manner. This affects the agricultural practice a lot and in the end the land remains barren with no fertility. This paper talks about different automation practices like IOT, Wireless Communications, Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, Deep learning. There are some areas which are causing the problems to agriculture field like crop diseases, lack of storage management, pesticide control, weed management, lack of irrigation and water management and all this problems can be solved by above mentioned different techniques. Today, there is an urgent need to decipher the issues like use of harmful pesticides, controlled irrigation, control on pollution and effects of environment in agricultural practice. Automation of farming practices has proved to increase the gain from the soil and also has strengthened the soil fertility. This paper surveys the work of many researchers to get a brief overview about the current implementation of automation in agriculture. The paper also discusses a proposed system which can be implemented in botanical farm for flower and leaf identification and watering using IOT.

Kirtan Jha

Papers

A comprehensive review on automation in agriculture using artificial intelligence

Intelligent irrigation system using artificial intelligence and machine learning: a comprehensive review