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Advanced Machine Learning and Remote Sensing in Agriculture

A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This special issue belongs to the section "Remote Sensing in Agriculture and Vegetation".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 March 2022) | Viewed by 22228

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
INSA Centre Val de Loire, PRISME, EA 4229, F18020 Bourges, France
Interests: machine learning; computer vision; image processing; pattern recognition; remote sensing; application in agriculture
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Remote sensing has a pivotal role in many areas of research and applications. Indeed, the last decade has seen significant technological advances in sensors, data acquisition, storage, and computing resources. The availability of data at multiple scales over large geographical areas has great potential to enable interesting methodologies and knowledge development in the agricultural domain. On the other hand, advanced machine learning has emerged as a powerful approach for analyzing remote sensing data. There is a growing trend to develop such an approach to assist in the digital transformation of agriculture, such as land use monitoring, crop yield forecasting and optimization, ecosystem management, etc.

However, despite these advances and the growing level of knowledge, significant challenges remain in the processing and analysis of remote sensing images in agriculture. For instance, the semantic gap between the information contained in the images and the functioning of crops or biophysical models, unlabeled and unbalanced data, generalization of learned models across different scales and environments, model explicability and interpretation, etc.

This Special Issue will disseminate the latest research findings in the machine learning methods using remote sensing data. It includes but is not limited to crops classification, disease identification and assessment, yield prediction and optimization, phenotyping, etc.

Dr. Adel Hafiane
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2700 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

  • Supervised and unsupervised learning
  • Weakly learning
  • Deep learning
  • Domain knowledge and adaptive learning
  • Semantic models
  • Generative models
  • Feature engineering
  • Crop monitoring and tools
  • Ecosystem and environment management
  • Agricultural models

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

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21 pages, 8163 KiB  
Article
Monitoring Complex Integrated Crop–Livestock Systems at Regional Scale in Brazil: A Big Earth Observation Data Approach
by Patrick Calvano Kuchler, Margareth Simões, Rodrigo Ferraz, Damien Arvor, Pedro Luiz Oliveira de Almeida Machado, Marcos Rosa, Raffaele Gaetano and Agnès Bégué
Remote Sens. 2022, 14(7), 1648; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14071648 - 30 Mar 2022
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 3098
Abstract
Due to different combinations of agriculture, livestock and forestry managed by rotation, succession and intercropping practices, integrated agriculture production systems such as integrated crop–livestock systems (iCL) constitute a very complex target and a challenge for automatic mapping of cropping practices based on remote [...] Read more.
Due to different combinations of agriculture, livestock and forestry managed by rotation, succession and intercropping practices, integrated agriculture production systems such as integrated crop–livestock systems (iCL) constitute a very complex target and a challenge for automatic mapping of cropping practices based on remote sensing data. The overall objective of this study was to develop a classification strategy for the annual mapping of integrated Crop–Livestock systems (iCL) at a regional scale. This strategy was designed and tested in the six agro-climatic regions of Mato Grosso, the largest Brazilian soybean producer state, using MODIS satellite time-series images acquired between 2012 and 2019, ground data with heterogeneous distribution in space and time and a Random Forest classifier. The results showed that: 1. the use of unbalanced training samples with a class composition close to the real one was the right classifier training strategy; 2. the use of a single training database (pooling samples from different years and regions) to classify each region and year individually proved to be robust enough to provide similar classification accuracies in comparison to those based on the use of a database acquired for each region and for each year. The final hierarchical classification overall accuracy was 0.89 for Level 1, the cropping pattern level (single and double crops DC); 0.84 for Level 2, the DC category level (integrated system iCL soy-pasture/brachiaria, soy-cotton and soy-cereal); 0.77 for Level 3, the iCL level (iCL1 soy-pasture and iCL2 soy-pasture mixed with corn). The F-scores for DC, iCL and iCL1 cropping systems presented high accuracy (0.89, 0.85 and 0.84), while iCL2 was more difficult to classify (0.63). This approach will next be applied across the entire Brazilian soybean corridor, leading to an operational tool for monitoring the adoption of sustainable intensification practices recognized by Brazil’s Agriculture Low Carbon Plan (ABC PLAN). Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Machine Learning and Remote Sensing in Agriculture)
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19 pages, 12375 KiB  
Article
High-Accuracy Detection of Maize Leaf Diseases CNN Based on Multi-Pathway Activation Function Module
by Yan Zhang, Shiyun Wa, Yutong Liu, Xiaoya Zhou, Pengshuo Sun and Qin Ma
Remote Sens. 2021, 13(21), 4218; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13214218 - 21 Oct 2021
Cited by 54 | Viewed by 3579
Abstract
Maize leaf disease detection is an essential project in the maize planting stage. This paper proposes the convolutional neural network optimized by a Multi-Activation Function (MAF) module to detect maize leaf disease, aiming to increase the accuracy of traditional artificial intelligence methods. Since [...] Read more.
Maize leaf disease detection is an essential project in the maize planting stage. This paper proposes the convolutional neural network optimized by a Multi-Activation Function (MAF) module to detect maize leaf disease, aiming to increase the accuracy of traditional artificial intelligence methods. Since the disease dataset was insufficient, this paper adopts image pre-processing methods to extend and augment the disease samples. This paper uses transfer learning and warm-up method to accelerate the training. As a result, three kinds of maize diseases, including maculopathy, rust, and blight, could be detected efficiently and accurately. The accuracy of the proposed method in the validation set reached 97.41%. This paper carried out a baseline test to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. First, three groups of CNNs with the best performance were selected. Then, ablation experiments were conducted on five CNNs. The results indicated that the performances of CNNs have been improved by adding the MAF module. In addition, the combination of Sigmoid, ReLU, and Mish showed the best performance on ResNet50. The accuracy can be improved by 2.33%, proving that the model proposed in this paper can be well applied to agricultural production. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Machine Learning and Remote Sensing in Agriculture)
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Review

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24 pages, 381 KiB  
Review
Computer Vision, IoT and Data Fusion for Crop Disease Detection Using Machine Learning: A Survey and Ongoing Research
by Maryam Ouhami, Adel Hafiane, Youssef Es-Saady, Mohamed El Hajji and Raphael Canals
Remote Sens. 2021, 13(13), 2486; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13132486 - 25 Jun 2021
Cited by 104 | Viewed by 14573
Abstract
Crop diseases constitute a serious issue in agriculture, affecting both quality and quantity of agriculture production. Disease control has been a research object in many scientific and technologic domains. Technological advances in sensors, data storage, computing resources and artificial intelligence have shown enormous [...] Read more.
Crop diseases constitute a serious issue in agriculture, affecting both quality and quantity of agriculture production. Disease control has been a research object in many scientific and technologic domains. Technological advances in sensors, data storage, computing resources and artificial intelligence have shown enormous potential to control diseases effectively. A growing body of literature recognizes the importance of using data from different types of sensors and machine learning approaches to build models for detection, prediction, analysis, assessment, etc. However, the increasing number and diversity of research studies requires a literature review for further developments and contributions in this area. This paper reviews state-of-the-art machine learning methods that use different data sources, applied to plant disease detection. It lists traditional and deep learning methods associated with the main data acquisition modalities, namely IoT, ground imaging, unmanned aerial vehicle imaging and satellite imaging. In addition, this study examines the role of data fusion for ongoing research in the context of disease detection. It highlights the advantage of intelligent data fusion techniques, from heterogeneous data sources, to improve plant health status prediction and presents the main challenges facing this field. The study concludes with a discussion of several current issues and research trends. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Machine Learning and Remote Sensing in Agriculture)
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