A review of modern techniques for plant disease identification and weed detection in precision agriculture

Abstract

Plant disease identification and weed detection are critical components of precision agriculture, aimed at ensuring high crop yields and sustainable farming practices. These processes involve the use of advanced machine learning and deep learning techniques to automatically identify and classify plant diseases and distinguish between crops and weeds in agricultural fields. Traditional methods for managing these challenges are often labor intensive, prone to errors, and environmentally unsustainable, necessitating the development of automated, accurate, and scalable solutions. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art approaches, including pixel-based, region-based, and spectral-based methods, and evaluates their effectiveness in various agricultural contexts. Additionally, it identifies significant challenges such as data scarcity, model generalization, and computational constraints, while proposing potential research directions to address these gaps. The findings aim to guide future research in developing more robust and interpretable models that can be deployed in real-world agricultural environments, ultimately contributing to more efficient, precise, and sustainable farming practices.