Vegetation cultivated in aquaponics environments is prone to multiple diseases or biotic pressures throughout its development, similarly to conventional farming. Timely identification of these diseases is essential to maintaining the effectiveness of the aquaponics setup and advancing its development. Aquaponics merges recirculating aquaculture with soilless hydroponic cultivation and has the potential to ensure food security, alleviate water shortages, and reduce carbon emissions. To facilitate the widespread adoption of this agricultural method, an integrated platform is required to identify plant ailments and assist scientists and growers in identifying potential causes and remedies at an early stage. This research introduces an automated plant diagnostic framework for recognizing biotic pressures and controlling diseases in four leafy green vegetables—lettuce, basil, spinach, and parsley—cultivated within an aquaponics environment. Initially, a collection of 2640 images is assembled. Subsequently, a disease identification system operating in three stages is created. The initial stage involves a crop classification mechanism that determines the plant species. The second stage comprises a disease identification mechanism that assesses the plant’s health condition. The concluding stage is a disease-detection mechanism that pinpoints diseased and healthy areas on foliage and classifies the illness. The suggested method has yielded encouraging results, achieving accuracies of 95.83%, 94.13%, and 82.13% in the three stages, respectively. The ultimate disease-detection mechanism is then combined with an ontology framework via a cloud-based interface. This ontology framework includes domain expertise concerning plant pathology, specifically the origins and remedies for various ailments of the examined leafy green vegetables, which can be automatically retrieved upon illness detection, enabling farm operators to implement preventive actions. The suggested application is important as a decision-support tool that automates health surveillance in aquaponics facilities and helps agricultural practitioners make decisions on crop and disease control.
Contemporary swine husbandry falls short in operational effectiveness, as current systems depend largely on electromechanical controls and can only classify pigs by body mass. Such a method is not only inefficient but also increases labor overheads and the risk of zoonotic infections. Additionally, confining pigs in large herds can worsen disease transmission and make the observation and treatment of unwell animals more difficult. This investigation conducted a trial to develop a deep-learning categorization mechanism, drawing on a dataset enriched with essential metrics and farm imagery amassed over 24 months. The study utilized a Kalman filter-based algorithm to boost the precision of the dynamic categorization process. The experiment introduced a first-of-its-kind machine vision classification system, powered by deep learning, capable of processing live images for multifaceted recognition. The individual recognition model, built on a Residual Neural Network (ResNet), predicts livestock mass using ongoing data. In contrast, the Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Nets (WGAN) image enhancement algorithm improves recognition across diverse conditions, thereby strengthening the model’s resilience. Crucially, the system can detect livestock exhibiting signs of likely illness via atypical body language and sequester them for protection. Experimental results confirm the advantage of the introduced system over standard alternatives. It not only reduces manual intervention and data maintenance costs but also improves the accuracy of livestock recognition and better uses data. The outcomes demonstrate an 89% success rate in livestock ID recognition, a 32% increase in blocked-image recognition, a 95% surge in livestock categorization precision, and a striking 98% success rate in distinguishing pictures of sick pigs. In essence, this research enhances identification efficiency, reduces operating costs, and provides superior tools for disease surveillance.
Accurate identification of rice diseases in precision agriculture using imagery remains difficult due to substantial misclassification rates, a wide range of influencing factors, and fluctuating conditions. While machine learning together with convolutional neural networks has yielded encouraging results for detecting rice diseases, these approaches have struggled to elucidate the interconnections among disease characteristics. In this work, we introduce an enhanced classification framework for rice diseases that combines a convolutional neural network (CNN) with a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU). Concretely, a residual connection was embedded into the Inception module, its depth was enlarged, and a refined Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) was incorporated. The upgraded CNN and the BiGRU were trained and evaluated separately; their outputs were then concatenated and forwarded to the classification layer for final prediction. Trials confirm that this strategy achieves 98.21% classification accuracy across four rice disease categories, delivering a robust solution for rice disease detection research.
Computer vision and deep learning methods have attracted substantial interest in agriculture owing to their contactless, non-destructive nature. These technologies are increasingly being embedded in modern farming platforms, such as aquaponics, to tackle the barriers limiting their commercial expansion and industrial-scale deployment. Aquaponics is a production technique that fuses a recirculating aquaculture setup with soilless hydroponic cultivation, holding promise for addressing food security challenges. To supplement existing investigative efforts, a procedure is proposed to automatically quantify crop morphological features—namely, width, length, and area—and to infer the effective planting distance between grow channels. Planting distance is a core design variable that depends on crop type and its morphological expression; it therefore requires continuous surveillance to safeguard high yield and quality, which can be compromised by canopy occlusion or overlapping as plants develop. The presented pipeline applies Mask R-CNN to estimate crop dimensions and a mathematical formulation to determine plant spacing tailored to a self-adapting aquaponics installation. For common little gem romaine lettuce, growth is predicted within a 2 cm deviation for both length and width. The finalized model is served via a cloud-based platform and is coupled with an ontology model that encodes domain expertise in aquaponics systems. Pertinent knowledge regarding crop traits and ideal planting intervals is drawn from the ontology and cross-checked against the model’s outputs to propose follow-up measures. The introduced application derives its value as a decision-support framework, potentially paving the way for intelligent oversight and regulation.
Properly managing water application in urban plantings is essential throughout arid and semi-arid regions and depends upon consistently accurate calculations of reference evapotranspiration (ETo). The meteorological observations obtainable in city landscapes, however, are rarely sufficient to apply the standard Penman-Monteith methodology for ETo derivation. Intelligent landscape irrigation controllers thus often rely on temperature-driven ETo approximations to automate watering schedules. The present study is directed at crafting deep learning temperature-based ETo predictors and contrasting their accuracy against two widely adopted empirical temperature-based formulas, specifically the FAO Blaney and Criddle (BC) and Hargreaves and Samani (HS). A complementary, freely available, and intuitive software utility, DeepET, was also developed based on the highest-performing deep learning predictors produced in this work. Four classes of artificial neural network (ANN) predictors were assembled, one group operating on raw weather observations and a second group utilizing wavelet-transformed reconstructed signals as input features. Additionally, long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (NN) and one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) predictors were built. The dataset underpinning this work was sourced from 101 operational California Irrigation Management Information System (CIMIS) weather stations, yielding more than 725,000 data points spanning 1985-2019. All predictors were benchmarked against the officially reported CIMIS ETo. When tested on previously unseen station records, the temperature-fed DL (Deep Learning) predictors yielded mean absolute errors that were 15%–20% lower than those from the locally calibrated HS equation. Feeding reconstructed wavelet-transform signals into the ANN predictors did not yield any measurable gain. Our findings suggest that DL-based predictors constitute a compelling approach to improving ETo accuracy in urban settings when only temperature readings are available. The DeepET utility is reachable from the Haghverdi Water Management Group portal: http://www. ucrwater.com/software-and-tools.html.
Global food security is critically threatened by plant diseases, which can be especially catastrophic for smallholder farmers whose economic survival hinges on a productive groundnut crop. It is therefore vital to engineer an algorithm capable of early, automated plant disease diagnosis. Working alongside a pathologist, a large-scale dataset of groundnut leaf imagery was assembled to enable this automated detection. In image classification tasks, Convolutional Neural Networks have demonstrated remarkable efficiency. This investigation constructs a disease identification and classification system using a tri-CNN architecture that incorporates DenseNet169, Inception, and Xception, all of which were initially trained on the ImageNet database. The proposed ensemble strategy formulates final predictions for test data by applying two custom nonlinear functions to the decision outputs of these base learners, integrating their scores across four standard performance measures: recall, precision, accuracy, and F1-score. The tailored CNN models are thus utilized to train our system for superior results. The methodology was tested on a real-world groundnut leaf dataset. The introduced model registered an accuracy reading of 98.46%.
Achieving sustainability and efficiency in maintaining high crop yields while minimizing agricultural chemical pollution requires precise weed mapping to fully deploy site-specific weed management—a persistent, major hurdle in contemporary farming. This investigation tested the resilience of training epochs for the You Only Look Once (YOLO) v5s convolutional neural network (CNN) model in building an automated system for classifying crops and weeds from UAV-acquired imagery. The images were labeled with bounding boxes and trained on Google Colab across 100, 300, 500, 600, 700, and 1000 epochs. The network identified and sorted five distinct categories: sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), banana trees (Musa), spinach (Spinacia oleracea), pepper (Capsicum), and weeds. Training proceeded over multiple epochs to pinpoint the peak test-set performance and was terminated once the test metrics (overall accuracy, precision, and recall) began to decline. The findings reveal a marked improvement in classifier capability as the epoch count climbed from 100 to 600. However, a modest reduction surfaced at 700 epochs, where overall accuracy, weed precision, and recall registered 65, 43, and 43%, respectively, contrasted with the 67, 78, and 34% achieved on these same metrics at 600 epochs. This erosion continued at 1000 epochs, producing an overall accuracy of 65%, a weak precision of 45%, and a recall of 40%. These outcomes confirm that the training epoch length in YOLOv5s substantially governs the model’s reliability for automated crop and weed discrimination, singling out 600 epochs as the optimal performance point.
The evaluation of plants in greenhouse environments is an essential phase in the development and assessment of new herbicides, as it enables controlled examination of species responses to different formulations and concentrations. To this end, experiments are performed in greenhouses where the injury inflicted on treated plants is monitored daily. Each pot is typically assessed by comparing it against an untreated reference pot, designated as a control. Presently, this task is carried out pot by pot via a time-intensive procedure reliant on visual judgments made by experienced specialists. Digital instruments are needed to shorten the time required and to equip specialists with approaches that are both more objective and more repeatable for quantifying plant injury. A novel solution, grounded in image processing and deep learning, is introduced to estimate plant injury across different developmental stages in the greenhouse. Plants are exposed to multiple injury types and phases, and photographs of them are taken to assemble a dataset. The accessible annotation corresponds to the injury estimation score supplied by the specialists. The proposed framework attempts to replicate the way specialists assess plant injury through a two-stage process. First, the reduction in biomass of the evaluated plant relative to its control plant is quantified; second, potential disease markers on the plant are identified. The former step uses classical image processing methods, while the latter relies on a deep learning-based multi-label classification model for symptom recognition. The algorithm has been validated on two species: Glycine max (soybean) and Amaranthus retroflexus (redroot amaranth). Coefficients of determination (R²) of 0.87 and 0.89 are attained, respectively, for injury estimation. The approach enhances both the efficiency and the objectivity of the current manual workflow.
In some Asian countries, jute is a fundamental source of revenue and contributes to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Like other crops, jute is vulnerable to pest invasions, and detecting them often relies on visual inspection in countries such as Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, and China. This practice is also slow, difficult, and somewhat inaccurate, posing a significant economic risk. To mitigate this challenge, the investigation proposes a highly accurate and resilient transfer learning (TL)- based JutePestDetect model for detecting jute pests at their initial stages. To begin with, we assembled a jute pest collection comprising 17 categories and roughly 380 images per category, which were scrutinized after manual and automated preprocessing and refinement, including background removal and scaling. Following this, five distinguished pre-trained architectures—DenseNet201, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, VGG19, and ResNet50—were picked from an earlier work to formulate the JutePestDetect model. Every architecture was adjusted by replacing the classification layer with a global average pooling layer and inserting a dropout layer for regularization. For performance measurement, a range of indicators, including precision, recall, F1 score, ROC curve, and confusion matrix, were used. These examinations provided a deeper understanding of the models’ capabilities. Within this set, the proposed JutePestDetect model, based on a tailored regularized DenseNet201, outperformed its counterparts, achieving an outstanding accuracy of 99%. Hence, our suggested method and tactics deliver a refined solution for pest recognition specific to jute, with the potential to substantially assist cultivators worldwide.
In contemporary farming, visual perception systems grounded in deep learning are emerging to equip autonomous vehicles with the capability to perform crop-field interventions. Yet securing strong performance from these techniques hinges on access to large volumes of data, a resource that is typically scarce in agricultural contexts. The core reason is that constructing an agricultural dataset that captures a given problem in exhaustive breadth is difficult, since the visual presentation of symptoms is subject to change. There is pronounced sensitivity to ambient variables such as heat, dampness, and lighting regimes. An efficient pipeline is therefore imperative to methodically shepherd the full sequence of building an agricultural dataset, from initial image capture through to its web-facing release. This manuscript describes the Eden Library, a platform conceived to help close the recognized shortfall in freely available crop and plant repositories that span both close-range and overhead imagery. The end-to-end workflow underpinning the platform’s conception and launch is also set forth and explored. This workflow merits attention because the datasets on offer are designed not as static, one-off research outputs confined to a narrow slice of species, growth stages, and environmental circumstances, but rather as evolving resources to be stewarded and expanded across time. Annotations delineating plants and their associated symptoms are supplied, thereby relieving users of the manual labeling workload. At the time of writing, the Eden Library spans 15 distinct crop species, 9 weed varieties, and 30 forms of disorder (encompassing pests, diseases, and nutritional shortfalls). The Eden Library endeavors to narrow this divide by delivering a voluminous, richly varied image trove of plants, curated coherently, to accelerate the development of future vision-driven, AI-augmented field tools.
In recent years, the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in farming has emerged as a critical priority. Embracing technological innovation in agriculture, when pursued imaginatively, unlocks significant value. A vital procedure involves managing affected leaves throughout crop cultivation. The prompt identification, categorization, and examination of foliar diseases, together with viable remedies, perpetually foster agricultural progress. A central emphasis of our proposed study is the detection and categorization of diseases across different crops, specifically targeting tomatoes and grapes. The principal aim is to anticipate the type of disease likely to affect grape and tomato foliage at an early stage. Techniques employing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are harnessed for Multi-Crop Leaf Disease (MCLD) detection. A deep learning-centric model carried out image feature extraction to differentiate between infected and vigorous leaves. The CNN-dependent Visual Geometry Group (VGG) model is applied to achieve superior performance indicators. A collection of crop leaf imagery serves to both train and evaluate the model. Metrics gauging performance, including accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, recall, and the F1-score, were determined and observed. The overarching research aim with the proposed framework is to secure steady enhancements in outcomes. The engineered model distinguishes leaves impacted by disease with heightened precision. In the experimental setup, the suggested investigation achieved 98.40% accuracy for grapevines and 95.71% for tomato plants. This body of work directly contributes to boosting agricultural food output.
Traditional weed control strategies are ineffective and cannot be readily combined with intelligent farm machinery. The automated recognition and categorization of weeds is crucial for weed management and for enhancing agricultural output. The success of intelligent, precise spot-spraying platforms hinges on the accuracy of computer-vision-based detectors used for autonomous weed suppression. This work examined the practicality of deep learning frameworks (Alexnet, GoogLeNet, InceptionV3, Xception) for detecting weeds in RGB pictures taken in a bell pepper crop. The architectures were trained with differing epoch values (10, 20, 30) and batch sizes (16, 32), while hyperparameters were fine-tuned to secure the best possible results. Overall accuracy for the selected architectures spanned from 94.5 to 97.7%. InceptionV3 stood out, delivering peak performance with a 30-epoch run and a batch size of 16, attaining 97.7% accuracy, 98.5% precision, and 97.8% recall. Regarding this InceptionV3 configuration, the type I and type II error rates were 1.4% and 0.9%, respectively. The proven power of deep learning models charts a straightforward course for integrating these algorithms with image-guided herbicide delivery units to achieve precise weed management.