Integrated pest management relies on insect pest monitoring to support the decision of counteracting a given level of infestation and to select the adequate control method. The classic monitoring approach of insect pests is based on placing in single infested areas a series of traps that are checked by human operators on a temporal basis. This strategy requires high labor cost and provides poor spatial and temporal resolution achievable by single operators. The adoption of image sensors to monitor insect pests can result in several practical advantages. The purpose of this review is to summarize the progress made on automatic traps with a particular focus on camera-equipped traps. The use of software and image recognition algorithms can support automatic trap usage to identify and/or count insect species from pictures. Considering the high image resolution achievable and the opportunity to exploit data transfer systems through wireless technology, it is possible to have remote control of insect captures, limiting field visits. The availability of real-time and on-line pest monitoring systems from a distant location opens the opportunity for measuring insect population dynamics constantly and simultaneously in a large number of traps with a limited human labor requirement. The actual limitations are the high cost, the low power autonomy and the low picture quality of some prototypes together with the need for further improvements in fully automated pest detection. Limits and benefits resulting from several case studies are examined with a perspective for the future development of technology-driven insect pest monitoring and management.

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Insect pest monitoring with camera-equipped traps: strengths and limitations

The agricultural production rate plays a pivotal role in the economic development of a country. However, plant diseases are the most significant impediment to the production and quality of food. The identification of plant diseases at an early stage is crucial for global health and wellbeing. The traditional diagnosis process involves visual assessment of an individual plant by a pathologist through on-site visits. However, manual examination for crop diseases is restricted because of less accuracy and the small accessibility of human resources. To tackle such issues, there is a demand to design automated approaches capable of efficiently detecting and categorizing numerous plant diseases. Precise identification and classification of plant diseases is a tedious job due because of the occurrence of low-intensity information in the image background and foreground, the huge color resemblance in the healthy and diseased plant areas, the occurrence of noise in the samples, and changes in the position, chrominance, structure, and size of plant leaves. To tackle the above-mentioned problems, we have introduced a robust plant disease classification system by introducing a Custom CenterNet framework with DenseNet-77 as a base network. The presented method follows three steps. In the first step, annotations are developed to get the region of interest. Secondly, an improved CenterNet is introduced in which DenseNet-77 is proposed for deep keypoints extraction. Finally, the one-stage detector CenterNet is used to detect and categorize several plant diseases. To conduct the performance analysis, we have used the PlantVillage Kaggle database, which is the standard dataset for plant diseases and challenges in terms of intensity variations, color changes, and differences found in the shapes and sizes of leaves. Both the qualitative and quantitative analysis confirms that the presented method is more proficient and reliable to identify and classify plant diseases than other latest approaches.

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A novel deep learning method for detection and classification of plant diseases

Nowadays, when high industrial productivity is connected with high quality and low product faults, it is common practice to use 100% product quality control. Since the quantities of products are high in mass production and inspection time must be as low as possible, the solution may be to use visual inspection of finished parts via camera systems and subsequent image processing using artificial intelligence. Recently, deep learning has shown itself to be the most appropriate and effective method for this purpose. The present article deals with the above-mentioned method of deep learning, and especially with its application when recognizing certain objects and elements during the visual product inspection.

Visual Product Inspection Based on Deep Learning Methods

Cereal grains and nuts are represented as the economic backbone of many developed and developing countries. Kernels of cereal grains and nuts are prone to mold infection under high relative humidity and suitable temperature conditions in the field as well as storage conditions. Health risks caused by molds and their molecular metabolite mycotoxins are, therefore, important topics to investigate. Strict regulations have been developed by international trade regulatory bodies for the detection of mold growth and mycotoxin contamination across the food chain starting from the harvest to storage and consumption. Molds and aflatoxins are not evenly distributed over the bulk of grains, thus appropriate sampling for detection and quantification is crucial. Existing reference methods for mold and mycotoxin detection are destructive in nature as well as involve skilled labor and hazardous chemicals. Also, these methods cannot be used for inline sorting of the infected kernels. Thus, analytical methods have been extensively researched to develop the one that is more practical to be used in commercial detection and sorting processes. Among various analytical techniques, optical imaging and spectroscopic techniques are attracting growers' attention for their potential of nondestructive and rapid inline identification and quantification of molds and mycotoxins in various food products. This review summarizes the recent application of rapid and nondestructive optical imaging and spectroscopic techniques, including digital color imaging, X-ray imaging, near-infrared spectroscopy, fluorescent, multispectral, and hyperspectral imaging. Advance chemometric techniques to identify very low-level mold growth and mycotoxin contamination are also discussed. Benefits, limitations, and challenges of deploying these techniques in practice are also presented in this paper.

Research advancements in optical imaging and spectroscopic techniques for nondestructive detection of mold infection and mycotoxins in cereal grains and nuts

Fusarium head blight (FHB) is one of the most important diseases in wheat worldwide. Evaluation and identification of effective fungicides are essential for control of FHB. However, traditional methods based on the manual disease severity assessment to evaluate the efficacy of fungicides are time-consuming and laborsome. In this study, we developed a new method to rapidly assess the severity of FHB and evaluate the efficacy of fungicide application programs. Enhanced red-green-green (RGG) images were processed from acquired raw red-green-blue (RGB) images of wheat ear samples; the images were transformed in color spaces through K-means clustering for rough segmentation of wheat ears; a random forest classifier was used with features of color, texture, geometry and vegetation index for fine segmentation of disease spots in wheat ears; a newly proposed width mutation counting algorithm was used to count wheat ears; and the disease severity of the wheat ears groups was graded and the efficacy of six fungicides was evaluated. The results show that the segmentation algorithm could segment wheat ears from a complex field background. And the counting algorithm could effectively solve the problem of wheat ear adhesion and occlusion. The average counting accuracy of all and diseased wheat ears were 93.00% and 92.64%, respectively, with the coefficients of determination (R
 2
) of 0.90 and 0.98, and the root mean square error (RMSE) of 10.56 and 7.52, respectively. The new method could accurately assess the diseased levels of wheat eat groups infected by FHB and determine the efficacy of the six fungicides evaluated. The results demonstrate a potential of using digital imaging technology to evaluate and identify effective fungicides for control of the FHB disease in wheat and other crop diseases.

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Evaluation of Efficacy of Fungicides for Control of Wheat Fusarium Head Blight Based on Digital Imaging

The importance of agriculture in modern society need not be overstated. In order to meet the huge requirements of food and to mitigate, the conventional problems of cropping smart and sustainable agriculture have emerged over the conventional agriculture. From computational perspective, computer vision and machine learning techniques have been applied in many aspects of human and social life, and agriculture is not also an exception. This review paper gives an overview of machine learning and computer vision techniques which are inherently associated with this domain. A summary of the works highlighting different seeds, crops, fruits with the country is also enclosed. The paper also tries to give an analysis, which can help researchers to look at some relevant problems in the context of India.

A Review on Agricultural Advancement Based on Computer Vision and Machine Learning

Onion production is severely affected by waterlogging conditions, which are created due to heavy rainfall. Hence, the identification of waterlogging-tolerant onion genotypes is crucial for increasing onion production. In the present study, 100 distinct onion genotypes were screened for waterlogging tolerance under artificial conditions by using the phenotypic approach in the monsoon season of 2017. Based on plant survival and recovery and changes in bulb weight, we identified 19 tolerant, 27 intermediate tolerant, and 54 highly sensitive onion genotypes. The tolerant genotypes exhibited higher plant survival and better recovery and bulb size, whereas sensitive genotypes exhibited higher plant mortality, poor recovery, and small bulb size under waterlogging conditions. Furthermore, a subset of 12 contrasting genotypes was selected for field trials during monsoon seasons 2018 and 2019. Results revealed that considerable variation in the morphological, physiological, and yield characteristics were observed across the genotypes under stress conditions. Waterlogging-tolerant genotypes, namely, Acc. 1666, Acc. 1622, W-355, W-208, KH-M-2, and RGP-5, exhibited higher plant height, leaf number, leaf area, leaf length, chlorophyll content, membrane stability index (MSI), pyruvic acid, antioxidant content, and bulb yield than sensitive genotypes under stress conditions. Furthermore, the principal component analysis biplot revealed a strong association of leaf number, leaf area, chlorophyll content, MSI, and bulb yield with tolerant genotypes under stress conditions. The study indicates that the waterlogging-tolerant onion genotypes with promising stress-adaptive traits can be used in plant breeding programs for developing waterlogging-tolerant onion varieties.

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Sourav Ghosh

Papers

A Review on Agricultural Advancement Based on Computer Vision and Machine Learning

Screening of Onion (Allium cepa L.) Genotypes for Waterlogging Tolerance