Deep learning for plant stress detection: A comprehensive review of technologies, challenges, and future directions

Deep learning (DL)-based systems have emerged as powerful methods for the diagnosis and treatment of plant stress, offering high accuracy and efficiency in analyzing imagery data. This review paper aims to present a thorough overview of the state-of-the-art DL technologies for plant stress detection. For this purpose, a systematic literature review was conducted to identify relevant articles for highlighting the technologies and approaches currently employed in the development of a DL-based plant stress detection system, specifically the advancement of image-based data collection systems, image preprocessing techniques, and deep learning algorithms and their applications in plant stress classification, disease detection, and segmentation tasks. Additionally, this review emphasizes the challenges and future directions in collecting and preprocessing image data, model development, and deployment in real-world agricultural settings. Some of the key findings from this review paper are: Training data: (i) Most plant stress detection models have been trained on Red Green Blue (RGB) images; (ii) Data augmentation can increase both the quantity and variation of training data; (iii) Handling multimodal inputs (e.g., image, temperature, humidity) allows the model to leverage information from diverse sources, which can improve prediction accuracy; Model Design and Efficiency: (i) Self-supervised learning (SSL) and Few-shot learning (FSL)-based methods may be better than transfer learning (TL)-based models for classifying plant stress when the number of labeled training images are scarce; (ii) Custom designed DL architectures for a specific stress and plant type can have better performance than the state-of-the-art DL architectures in terms of efficiency, overfitting, and accuracy; (iii) The multi-task learning DL structure reuses most of the network architecture while performing multiple tasks (e.g., estimate stress type and severity) simultaneously, which makes the learning much faster; Application and Practicality: (i) Training data collected from different growth settings or environmental conditions is important to increase the generalizability of the DL model; (ii) Overlapping stress symptoms can confuse the DL model; overlapping stress symptoms can be identified as a separate label such as “others” to solve this problem; (iii) Plant stress detection apps should have offline accessibility because remote field areas may not have internet access. This review can help shape the development of novel approaches, strategies, and applications that address the present gaps and challenges in plant stress detection.