Abstract
The agricultural production sector is of great interest to national economies, their GDP and the population's food chain. During digitalization and modernization, imaging techniques and machine learning are important driving factors.
In this research, a narrative critical literature review was conducted on the most used imaging modalities and their use with machine learning methods, which are examined along with their applications in the agricultural industry in production activities, as well as their limitations and existing challenges. This research is intended to support a further development of a technological framework for intelligent precision agroindustry production.
It was found that the most used imaging methods are hyperspectral and multispectral imaging, infrared thermal imaging, magnetic resonance imaging, X-ray imaging, scanning electron microscopy and ultraviolet imaging. The majority of employments of machine learning along with imaging was using supervised learning algorithms, there were a few applications using unsupervised and reinforcement learning algorithms.
From the results and analysis, it can be concluded that the use of imaging techniques enables an increase in quality and profit maximization of agro-industrial products and their characterization data, which can be better analyzed with the help of machine learning methods and lead to a more sustainable and innovative agro-industrial productive sector.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Silva, E., Grácio, C.: The agro-food sector in Portugal: evolution, challenges, and opportunities. Port. Econ. J. 19(2), 89–115 (2020)
Garske, B., Bau, A., Ekardt, F.: Digitalization and AI in European agriculture: a strategy for achieving climate and biodiversity targets? Sustainability 13(9), 4652 (2021)
Zhang, C., Kovacs, J.M.: The application of small unmanned aerial systems for precision agriculture: a review. Precision Agric. 13(6), 693–712 (2012)
Liakos, K.G., Busato, P., Moshou, D., Pearson, S., Bochtis, D.: Machine learning in agriculture: a review. Sensors 18(8), 2674 (2018)
Shirsath, P.B., Singh, A.K., Pathak, H.: Characterizing regional vulnerability to climate change using the IPCC framework. Clim. Change 143(1–2), 73–87 (2017)
Mahlein, A.K., Oerke, E.C., Steiner, U., Dehne, H.W.: Recent advances in sensing plant diseases for precision crop protection. Eur. J. Plant Pathol. 133(1), 197–209 (2012)
Nasirahmadi, A., Edwards, S.A., Sturm, B.: Automated image processing for behavioural monitoring of pigs: a review. Comput. Electron. Agric. 141, 302–317 (2017)
Tzounis, A., Katsoulas, N., Bartzanas, T., Kittas, C.: Internet of Things in agriculture, recent advances and future challenges. Biosys. Eng. 164, 31–48 (2017)
Gebbers, R., Adamchuk, V.I.: Precision agriculture and food security. Science 327(5967), 828–831 (2010)
Amigo, J.M.: Hyperspectral and multispectral imaging: setting the scene. In: Data Handling in Science and Technology, vol. 32, pp. 3–16. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2019)
Mahlein, A.K.: Plant disease detection by imaging sensors – parallels and specific demands for precision agriculture and plant phenotyping. Plant Dis. 100(2), 241–251 (2016)
Mulla, D.J.: Twenty-five years of remote sensing in precision agriculture: key advances and remaining knowledge gaps. Biosys. Eng. 114(4), 358–371 (2013)
Yaqoob, M., Sharma, S., Aggarwal, P.: Imaging techniques in agro-industry and their applications, a review. J. Food Meas. Character. 15, 2329–2343 (2021)
Sridhar, S., Gupta, R., Louis, G.: Reviewing the trend in image processing techniques used in the agriculture industry. In: Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Recent Trends in Environmental Science and Engineering, vol. 163, pp. 1–9 (2020)
Choudhury, M., et al.: Infrared imaging a new non-invasive machine learning technology for animal husbandry. Imaging Sci. J. 68(4), 240–249 (2020)
Nääs, I.A., Garcia, R.G., Caldara, F.R.: Infrared thermal image for assessing animal health and welfare. J. Animal Behav. Biometeorol. 2(3), 66–72 (2020)
Zheng, S., Zhou, C., Jiang, X., Huang, J., Xu, D.: Progress on infrared imaging technology in animal production: a review. Sensors 22(3), 705 (2022)
Renu, R., Chidanand, D.V.: Internal quality classification of agricultural produce using non-destructive image processing technologies (soft X-ray). Int. J. Latest Trends Eng. Technol. 2(4), 535–543 (2013)
Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R., Friedman, J.: The Elements of Statistical Learning. Springer, New York (2009)
Aggarwal, C.C., Reddy, C.K.: Data Clustering: Algorithms and Applications. CRC Press, Boca Raton (2013)
Murphy, K.P.: Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective. MIT Press, Cambridge (2012)
Nosratabadi, S., et al.: Data science in economics: comprehensive review of advanced machine learning and deep learning methods. Mathematics 8(10), 1799 (2020)
Sutton, R.S., Barto, A.G.: Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. MIT Press, Cambridge (2018)
Gupta, A., Chaurasiya, V.K.: Reinforcement learning based energy management in wireless body area network: a survey. In: 2019 IEEE Conference on Information and Communication Technology, pp. 1–6 (2019)
Li, L., Zhang, Q., Huang, D.: A review of imaging techniques for plant phenotyping. Sensors 14(11), 20078–20111 (2014)
Aghighi, H., Azadbakht, M., Yunus, P., Abdullah, S., Halin, A.A.: A review of hyperspectral imaging for food quality and safety. Appl. Biotechnol. Food Sci. 9(3), 123–139 (2018)
Calderón, R., Navas-Cortes, J.A., Lucena, C., Zarco-Tejada, P.J.: High-throughput UAV-based remote sensing for plant stress detection: rice case study. Eur. J. Agron. 45, 50–67 (2013)
Xie, C., Yang, C.: A review of hyperspectral imaging for plant phenotyping. Comput. Electron. Agric. 175, 105331 (2020)
Adao, T., et al.: Hyperspectral imaging: A review on UAV-based sensors, data processing and applications for agriculture and forestry. Remote Sensing 9(11), 1110 (2017)
Behmann, J., Steinrücken, J., Plümer, L.: Detection of early plant stress responses in hyperspectral images. ISPRS J. Photogramm. Remote. Sens. 93, 98–111 (2014)
Tsai, C.J., Chou, T.Y.: Challenges and opportunities in deploying artificial intelligence (AI) applications in real-world agriculture. Sustainability 12(17), 6927 (2020)
Guan, L., Niu, L., Zhang, Y., Dong, W., Wei, Y.: Applications of thermal imaging in agriculture and food industry: a review. Crit. Rev. Food Sci. Nutr. 59(15), 2439–2456 (2019)
Jones, H.G., Sirault, X.R.R.: Thermal and hyperspectral remote sensing in precision agriculture: crop stress and yield analysis. In: Remote Sensing for Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Hydrology XVI, vol. 9239, p. 92390L (2014)
Manuwa, S.I., Odey, S.O.: Thermal imaging techniques in agricultural and biological research. J. Agric. Biol. Eng. 5(2), 12–24 (2012)
Berni, J.A.J., Zarco-Tejada, P.J., Suárez, L., Fereres, E.: Thermal and narrow-band multispectral remote sensing for vegetation monitoring from an unmanned aerial vehicle. IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens. 47(3), 722–738 (2009)
Oomen, R.A., Van Der Kolk, J.H., Van Der Zijden, A.M.: Comparison of low-field MRI and radiography for the detection of bovine lung consolidation. Vet. Radiol. Ultrasound 60(3), 281–290 (2019)
van Dusschoten, D., et al.: Quantitative 3D analysis of plant roots growing in soil using magnetic resonance imaging. Plant Physiol. 170(3), 1176–1188 (2016)
Breyer, D., Jaeger, D., Gehl, C., Mair, P.: Magnetic resonance imaging in small animal veterinary practice: an update. Vet. J. 228, 70–77 (2017)
Peng, Y., Li, M.: X-ray computed tomography for agricultural and food research applications: a review. Comput. Electron. Agric. 138, 145–157 (2017)
Hong, S.J., et al.: Nondestructive prediction of pepper seed viability using single and fusion information of hyperspectral and X-ray images. Sens. Actuators, A 350, 114151 (2023)
Berckmans, D.: Smart farming with sensors and actuators, the rock around which the next agricultural revolution will revolve. J. Agric. Eng. 48(3), 106–114 (2017)
Goldstein, J., et al.: Scanning Electron Microscopy and X-ray Microanalysis. Springer, New York (2017)
Goodhew, P.J., Humphreys, J.: Electron Microscopy and Analysis. CRC Press, Boca Raton (2014)
Ravichandran, R., Sundarrajan, S., Venugopal, J.R., Mukherjee, S., Ramakrishna, S.: Applications of SEM-EDX in pharmaceutical formulations: a review. Mater. Sci. Eng., C 31(4), 1855–1865 (2011)
Bhattacharya, A., Ghosh, S. K.: Artificial Intelligence in Microscopy and Imaging. CRC Press, Boca Raton (2012)
Maimaitijiang, M., Sagan, V., Sidike, P., Hartling, S., Esposito, F., Peterson, K.: Unmanned aerial system advances health mapping in Sub-Saharan Africa. Sci. Rep. 7(1), 42713 (2017)
Jacovides, C.P., Fountas, S., Wulfsohn, D., Blackmore, B.S.: A review of applications of unmanned aerial vehicle systems for agricultural management. Span. J. Agric. Res. 15(2), e1108 (2017)
Patrício, D.I., Rieder, R.: Computer vision and artificial intelligence in precision agriculture for grain crops: a systematic review. Comput. Electron. Agric. 153, 69–81 (2018)
Hamuda, E., Mc Ginley, B., Glavin, M., Jones, E.: Automatic crop detection under field conditions using the modified adaptive boosting (AdaBoost.MH) algorithm. Comput. Electron. Agric. 124, 234–242 (2016)
Kamilaris, A., Prenafeta-Boldú, F.X.: Deep learning in agriculture: a survey. Comput. Electron. Agric. 147, 70–90 (2018)
Ma, L., Zheng, G., Li, P., Shi, Y.: Application of unsupervised learning algorithms to agricultural remote sensing image classification. Remote Sens. 11(6), 668 (2019)
Whelan, B., Taylor, J.: Precision Agriculture for Grain Production Systems. CSIRO Publishing (2013)
Singh, A., Ganapathysubramanian, B., Singh, A.K., Sarkar, S.: Machine learning for high-throughput stress phenotyping in plants. Trends Plant Sci. 21(2), 110–124 (2016)
Jin, X., Kumar, L., Li, Z.: A review of data mining-based financial fraud detection research. Procedia Comput. Sci. 91, 586–593 (2018)
Ferentinos, K.P.: Deep learning models for plant disease detection and diagnosis. Comput. Electron. Agric. 145, 311–318 (2018)
Pantazi, X.E., Moshou, D., Tamouridou, A.A., Paraskevas, M.: Automated leaf disease detection in different crop species through image features analysis and One-Class Support Vector Machines. Comput. Electron. Agric. 122, 41–48 (2016)
Subeesh, A., Mehta, C.R.: Automation and digitization of agriculture using artificial intelligence and internet of things. Artif. Intell. Agric. 5, 278–291 (2021)
Tu, S., Deng, Z.: An automatic data labeling method for deep learning in large-scale video surveillance applications. Multimed. Tools Appl. 76, 10399–10419 (2017)
Reyes, J., Venturini, S.: High-performance computing in agriculture: machine learning techniques and applications. Appl. Sci. 8(7), 1055 (2018)
Buda, M., Maki, A., Mazurowski, M.A.: A systematic study of the class imbalance problem in convolutional neural networks. Neural Netw. 106, 67–76 (2018)
Arulkumaran, K., Deisenroth, M.P., Brundage, M., Bharath, A.A.: A brief survey of deep reinforcement learning. arXiv e-prints, arXiv-1708 (2017)
Kaelbling, L.P., Littman, M.L., Moore, A.W.: Reinforcement learning: a survey. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 4, 237–285 (1996)
Zhang, X., Friedland, C.J., Zhang, X., El-Ghazawi, T.: Applying reinforcement learning to irrigation decision-making in precision agriculture. IFAC-PapersOnLine 51(17), 161–166 (2018)
Duckett, T., Pearson, S., Blackmore, S., Grieve, B.: Agricultural robotics: the future of robotic agriculture. arXiv e-prints, arXiv-1806 (2018)
Kober, J., Bagnell, J.A., Peters, J.: Reinforcement learning in robotics: a survey. Int. J. Robot. Res. 32(11), 1238–1274 (2013)
Norton, T., Chen, C., Larsen, M.L.V., Berckmans, D.: Precision livestock farming: building ‘digital representations’ to bring the animals closer to the farmer. Animal 13(12), 3009–3017 (2019)
Zhang, D., Zhou, G.: Estimation of soil moisture from optical and thermal remote sensing: a review. Sensors 16(8), 1308 (2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2025 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Vardasca, R., Pratas, A., Tereso, M., Bento, F. (2025). The Application of Imaging Methods and Machine Learning in the Agroindustry Sector at Production Activity. In: Guarda, T., Portela, F., Gatica, G. (eds) Advanced Research in Technologies, Information, Innovation and Sustainability. ARTIIS 2024. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 2346. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-83210-9_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-83210-9_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-83209-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-83210-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)