Deep learning in agriculture: A survey

In plain words

Satellites, aircraft and drones produce large volumes of images of farmland, and agriculture needs to make sense of them. This paper is a literature review: the authors collected 40 research projects that used deep learning, a family of neural networks that learn their own image features from large amounts of example data, on farming problems. Examples include finding weeds, counting fruit, recognising plant species and classifying land use.

For each project the authors recorded what problem it solved, which network design it used, where its data came from, how the data was cleaned and enlarged, and how well it performed. They then compared the findings across projects. Image-based convolutional networks were the most common choice, and most classification projects reported high accuracy. The review also points out that the projects tested on the same data they trained on, used different metrics, and rarely measured the same thing, so the scores are hard to compare directly.

TL;DR

• A survey, not a method: it summarises 40 agricultural deep-learning studies and tabulates their models, data, preprocessing, metrics and comparisons §2 §4.
• Convolutional networks are the most common design (17 of 40 papers), and most studies that used popular architectures applied transfer learning §4.6.
• Of the 24 papers reporting classification accuracy, 19 are above 90%, but only 8 of 40 tested on data different from their training data §4.9 §4.10.
• Use it to find which agricultural tasks have deep-learning work and which design choices recur. Do not use its numbers as a benchmark: they are author-reported and mostly not comparable §4.9.

Problem

Agricultural production has to rise while protecting ecosystems, and remote sensing (satellites, aircraft, UAVs) produces large volumes of image data §1. The authors observe that deep learning had entered agriculture recently, and state that, to their knowledge, this is the first survey of it in the agricultural domain §1. Their goal is to describe what has been done, which models and data were used, and how the results compare with older techniques §1 §2.

Method

The review has two steps §2:

1. Keyword search over IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, Web of Science and Google Scholar, using the query "deep learning" AND ("agriculture" OR "farming") §2. This gave 47 papers. Papers that did not apply deep learning to an agricultural problem, or that reported no meaningful results, were removed, leaving 40 §2 [fn. 2].
2. One-by-one analysis of the 40 papers against eight research questions: problem addressed, model type, data sources, classes and labels, data pre-processing and augmentation, performance under the metric used, testing on other datasets, and comparison with other techniques §2.

The paper then summarises the deep-learning background it relies on §3: networks learn features in a hierarchy, convolutional networks use learned filters followed by pooling, and fully connected layers at the end act as classifiers §3 fig. 1 fig. 2. Its example network is CaffeNet, which the authors show as a diagram fig. 1. They describe deep learning's main advantage as automatic feature learning, which removes most hand-designed feature engineering, and its main cost as longer training time §3.

The review's extraction procedure, written as pseudocode:

# Literature review procedure  [§2]
# Input:  search query; eight research questions
# Output: 40 analysed papers, one row each

def review(query, questions):
    # Keyword search over four scientific indexes  [§2]
    candidates = search(query, sources=["IEEE Xplore", "ScienceDirect",
                                        "Web of Science", "Google Scholar"])
    # Drop papers that do not apply deep learning to agriculture or report
    # no meaningful metrics  [§2] [fn. 2]
    selected = [p for p in candidates if applies_dl_to_agriculture(p)]
    rows = []
    # Answer each research question for each paper  [§2]
    for paper in selected:
        rows.append(extract(paper, questions))
    return rows

A few papers were excluded because they claimed a deep-learning use but showed no results or performance metrics §2 [fn. 2].

Hyperparameters

The survey does not propose hyperparameters. It reports what the surveyed studies used. Values are for the studies, not for this paper.

Results

Author-reported, aggregated by the survey authors from the 40 studies. These are not new experiments. Setups differ across studies, so the numbers are not directly comparable §4.9.

Paper vs code

No official code. The paper is a literature survey with no software release. Searched on 2026-10-19: the GitHub repository search for "deep learning agriculture survey kamilaris" returned nothing, and "deep learning agriculture" returned 1,777 repositories, none owned by an author or the authors' lab (the top ten were third-party projects).

Pitfalls

• Not a method. Nothing here can be implemented as is. The survey's "method" is the review protocol above. Do not copy the aggregate numbers into a benchmark: they mix different datasets, metrics, thresholds and architectures §4.9 §5.
• Metric definitions vary. Where a study reported "accuracy" without saying which metric, the survey assumed classification accuracy §4.8. The paper's Table 1 has 13 rows, including IoU-thresholded variants written as CA-IoU(x), F1-IoU(x) and P-IoU(x), with x the threshold in percent tab. 1.
• Same-data testing. Only 8 of 40 studies tested on different data. Of the other 32, 27 made no change between training and testing sets; the rest changed trees, rooms, fields or growth stage §4.10. The survey says this lowers confidence in the reported results §4.10 §5.
• Data needs. The authors say at least a few hundred images are needed in practice, even with augmentation, and more for many classes or fine distinctions §5.3. Several studies reported that more varied training data would be needed to improve accuracy §5.3.
• Learning rates are architecture-dependent. The survey notes that the right learning rate depends on the network and reports no general value §4.6.
• Some numbers are assumptions by the survey authors. Where a study reported accuracy without naming it, the survey assumed CA §4.8. Where two studies used different metrics, the survey compared only within the same study §4.11.
• Appendices not compiled. Appendix I (applications and sensing methods), Appendix II (the per-paper table with the 40 studies) and Appendix III (public datasets) are referenced by the text §1 §2 §5.4. They were not read for this card. Per-study details therefore come only from the main text.
• Images not included. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate CNN architecture and feature maps. Both are cited here but not reproduced fig. 1 fig. 2.

Lineage

• Builds on: not applicable. The survey's background sources are general deep-learning references §3 §3.1.
• Compared against: not applicable. The paper compares the surveyed studies with one another §4.11 §5.
• Superseded by: not known from content already in this wiki.