Agriculture currently faces the dual pressures of ensuring global food security and adapting to rapid climate change. To cope with these challenges, researchers have introduced several modern mechanization technologies, including advanced farm machinery, autonomous navigation systems, artificial intelligence, sensing technologies, and communication tools, to enhance productivity and sustainability (Syed et al., 2025a). These technologies enable data-driven decision-making by allowing continuous, large-scale acquisition and analysis of crop and environmental information. Consequently, accurately predicting crop yields and monitoring plant health in real time have become critical prerequisites for precision agricultural management (Syed et al., 2025). Traditional measurement methods-often labor-intensive, destructive, and spatially limited-are increasingly unable to meet the demands of modern large-scale farming. In this context, the integration of Remote Together, these ten contributions illustrate the maturation of agricultural remote sensing, moving towards models that are not only more accurate but also lighter, more interpretable, and more resilient to environmental noise. By combining satellite and UAV data with advanced computational models, these innovative approaches are paving the way for a more resilient and productive global food system. Future research will increasingly focus on improving the precision of crop yield estimation models through multi-dimensional analyses. As agricultural environments grow more complex, integrating AI-powered models with multi-sensor fusion technologies will be essential. Innovations such as lightweight neural networks and multimodal cross-attention frameworks will enable the detection of small, occluded, and densely packed targets with greater accuracy, thereby refining crop-specific metrics such as photosynthetically active radiation (FPAR) and nitrogen content. This, in turn, will enhance crop health monitoring and yield predictions.Additionally, UAV-based remote sensing, combined with multitier feature selection, will improve nitrogen content analysis in crops such as cotton, while image dehazing models and light-use efficiency frameworks will bolster biomass estimation.Emerging technologies such as the Ta-YOLO framework will further optimize small fruit detection in dense canopies, advancing overall crop detection accuracy.A key challenge lies in adapting these models to handle real-world complexities, such as variable environmental conditions. Future work will focus on improving the robustness of these models through dynamic coding networks and performance optimization, ensuring they can operate in heterogeneous agricultural environments.Interdisciplinary collaboration between agriculture, AI, and remote sensing experts will accelerate the development and deployment of these approaches, paving the way for more efficient crop yield estimation systems that are critical for ensuring food security and sustainable agricultural practices.
Wang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.