Artificial Neural Networks for Image Processing in Precision Agriculture: A Systematic Literature Review on Mango, Apple, Lemon, and Coffee Crops

Abstract

Precision agriculture is an approach that uses information technologies to improve and optimize agricultural production. It is based on the collection and analysis of agricultural data to support decision making in agricultural processes. In recent years, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have demonstrated significant benefits in addressing precision agriculture needs, such as pest detection, disease classification, crop state assessment, and soil quality evaluation. This article aims to perform a systematic literature review on how ANNs with an emphasis on image processing can assess if fruits such as mango, apple, lemon, and coffee are ready for harvest. These specific crops were selected due to their diversity in color and size, providing a representative sample for analyzing the most commonly employed ANN methods in agriculture, especially for fruit ripening, damage, pest detection, and harvest prediction. This review identifies Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), including commonly employed architectures such as VGG16 and ResNet50, as highly effective, achieving accuracies ranging between 83% and 99%. Additionally, it discusses the integration of hardware and software, image preprocessing methods, and evaluation metrics commonly employed. The results reveal the notable underuse of vegetation indices and infrared imaging techniques for detailed fruit quality assessment, indicating valuable opportunities for future research.

Code and data availability

This is a systematic literature review of ANN-based fruit/crop image analysis. The supplied blocks contain no public phenotype/trait datasets, plant images, author analysis code, trained models, or supplements specific to this paper; all datasets and methods discussed belong to cited prior studies, and the review notes

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