A Survey of Computer Vision Technologies in Urban and Controlled-environment Agriculture

Abstract

In the evolution of agriculture to its next stage, Agriculture 5.0, artificial intelligence will play a central role. Controlled-environment agriculture, or CEA, is a special form of urban and suburban agricultural practice that offers numerous economic, environmental, and social benefits, including shorter transportation routes to population centers, reduced environmental impact, and increased productivity. Due to its ability to control environmental factors, CEA couples well with computer vision (CV) in the adoption of real-time monitoring of the plant conditions and autonomous cultivation and harvesting. The objective of this article is to familiarize CV researchers with agricultural applications and agricultural practitioners with the solutions offered by CV. We identify five major CV applications in CEA, analyze their requirements and motivation, and survey the state-of-the-art as reflected in 68 technical papers using deep learning methods. In addition, we discuss five key subareas of computer vision and how they related to these CEA problems, as well as 14 vision-based CEA datasets. We hope the survey will help researchers quickly gain a bird’s-eye view of the striving research area and will spark inspiration for new research and development.