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AI meets UAVs: A survey on AI empowered UAV perception systems for precision agriculture

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journal contribution
posted on 2022-11-17, 08:48 authored by Jinya Su, Xiaoyong Zhu, Shihua Li, Wen-Hua ChenWen-Hua Chen

Precision Agriculture (PA) promises to boost crop productivity while reducing agricultural costs and environmental footprints, and therefore is attracting ever-increasing interests in both academia and industry. This management strategy is underpinned by various advanced technologies including Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) sensing systems and Artificial Intelligence (AI) perception algorithms. In particular, due to their unique advantages such as a low cost, high spatio-temporal resolutions, flexibility, automation functions and minimized risk of operation, UAV sensing systems have been extensively applied in many civilian applications including PA since 2010. In parallel, AI algorithms (deep learning since 2012 in particular) are also drawing ever-increasing attention in different fields, since they are able to analyse an unprecedented volume/velocity/variety of data (semi-) automatically, which are also becoming computationally practical with the advancements of cloud computing, Graphics Processing Units and parallel computing. In this survey paper, therefore, a thorough review is performed on recent use of UAV sensing systems (e.g., UAV platforms, external sensing units) and AI algorithms (mainly supervised learning algorithms) in PA applications throughout the crop life-cycle, as well as the challenges and prospects for future development of UAVs and AI in agriculture sector. It is envisioned that this review is able to provide a timely technical reference, demystifying and promoting research, deployment and successful exploitation of AI empowered UAV perception systems for PA, and therefore contributing to addressing future agricultural and human nutrition challenges.

Funding

Enabling wide area persistent remote sensing for agriculture applications by developing and coordinating multiple heterogeneous platforms

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

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Space-enabled Crop disEase maNagement sErvice via Crop sprAying Drones (SCENE-CAD)

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

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History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering

Published in

Neurocomputing

Volume

518

Pages

242 - 270

Publisher

Elsevier BV

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© Elsevier

Publisher statement

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Neurocomputing and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2022.11.020

Acceptance date

2022-11-03

Publication date

2022-11-11

Copyright date

2022

ISSN

0925-2312

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Wen-Hua Chen. Deposit date: 16 November 2022

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