Data-Driven Fields: AI and Unmanned Sensing Technologies in Agricultural Optimization

A special issue of AgriEngineering (ISSN 2624-7402). This special issue belongs to the section "Computer Applications and Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 August 2026 | Viewed by 1794

Special Issue Editors

Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA
Interests: remote sensing; machine learning; precision agriculture; UAV; high-throughput phenotyping; hyperspectral imaging
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
School of Mechanical Engineering, Ningxia University, Yinchuan, China
Interests: remote sensing; robot in-situ/IoT; crop phenotyping; agricultural sensor integration
Department of Biological Systems Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA
Interests: remote sensing; data fusion; precision agriculture; digital agriculture; carbon-water-crop nexus; global change
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue invites cutting-edge research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and sensor technology to accelerate the transition to digital, precise, and intelligent agriculture. High-resolution remote sensing, combined with deep learning and emerging foundation/generative models, is reshaping how we scout fields, diagnose crop stress, guide variable-rate inputs, and forecast yield. We particularly welcome studies that reduce data-acquisition costs through synthetic data and domain adaptation, fuse multi-modal sources (satellite, UAV, robot in-situ/IoT, agronomic text), and operationalize real-time decision support for irrigation, fertilization, and pest/disease management. Contributions that integrate physical knowledge with data-driven models, e.g., digital twins of fields and greenhouse, are encouraged.

This Special Issue focuses on, but is not limited to, agricultural engineering in the following areas:

  • Multi-modal data fusion;
  • Intelligent monitoring and field robotics;
  • Crop disease and pest detection using deep learning and generated data;
  • Sensors and detection technologies for precision agriculture;
  • Muti-scale remote sensing and artificial intelligence in agriculture;
  • Intelligent crop monitoring and management systems;
  • Combination of physical knowledge with data-driven models in the agricultural digital twin systems;
  • Real-time decision-making systems for digital agriculture.

Dr. Lang Qiao
Dr. Dehua Gao
Dr. Jiang Chen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. AgriEngineering is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • digital agriculture
  • crop phenotyping
  • computer vision in agriculture
  • drone
  • sustainable agriculture
  • sensors
  • pests and diseases
  • AI-generated content
  • agricultural optimization

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

20 pages, 2776 KB  
Article
AgriFusion: Multiscale RGB–NIR Fusion for Semantic Segmentation in Airborne Agricultural Imagery
by Xuechen Li, Lang Qiao and Ce Yang
AgriEngineering 2025, 7(11), 388; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriengineering7110388 - 15 Nov 2025
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1451
Abstract
The rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and deep learning has accelerated the application of semantic segmentation in precision agriculture (SSPA). A key driver of this progress lies in multimodal fusion, which leverages complementary structural, spectral, and physiological information to enhance the [...] Read more.
The rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and deep learning has accelerated the application of semantic segmentation in precision agriculture (SSPA). A key driver of this progress lies in multimodal fusion, which leverages complementary structural, spectral, and physiological information to enhance the representation of complex agricultural scenes. Despite advancements, the efficacy of multimodal fusion in SSPA is limited by modality heterogeneity and the difficulty of simultaneously retaining fine details and capturing global context. To address these challenges, we propose AgriFusion, a dual-encoder framework based on convolutional and transformer architectures for SSPA tasks. Specifically, convolutional and transformer encoders are first used to extract crop-related local structural details and global contextual features from multimodal inputs. Then, an attention-based fusion module adaptively integrates these complementary features in a modality-aware manner. Finally, a MLP-based decoder aggregates multi-scale representations to generate accurate segmentation results efficiently. Experiments conducted on the Agriculture-Vision dataset demonstrate that AgriFusion achieves a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 49.31%, Pixel Accuracy (PA) of 81.72%, and F1 score of 67.85%, outperforming competitive baselines including SegFormer, DeepLab, and AAFormer. Ablation studies further reveal that unimodal or shallow fusion strategies suffer from limited discriminative capacity, whereas AgriFusion adaptively integrates complementary multimodal features and balances fine-grained local detail with global contextual information, yielding consistent improvements in identifying planting anomalies and crop stresses. These findings validate our central claims that modality-aware spectral fusion and balanced multi-scale representation are critical to advancing agricultural semantic segmentation, and establish AgriFusion as a principled framework for enhancing remote sensing-based monitoring with practical implications for sustainable crop management and precision farming. Full article
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