Smart Agriculture Applications Using Deep Learning Technologies: A Survey

Agriculture is considered an important field with a significant economic impact in several countries. Due to the substantial population growth, meeting people’s dietary needs has become a relevant concern. The transition to smart agriculture has become inevitable to achieve these food security goals. In recent years, deep learning techniques, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN), have been intensely researched and applied in various fields, including agriculture. This study analyzed the recent research articles on deep learning techniques in agriculture over the previous five years and discussed the most important contributions and the challenges that have been solved. Furthermore, we investigated the agriculture parameters being monitored by the internet of things and used them to feed the deep learning algorithm for analysis. Additionally, we compared different studies regarding focused agriculture area, problems solved, the dataset used, the deep learning model used, the framework used, data preprocessing and augmentation method, and results with accuracy. We concluded in this survey that although CNN provides better results, it lacks in early detection of plant diseases. To cope with this issue, we proposed an intelligent agriculture system based on a hybrid model of CNN and SVM, capable of detecting and classifying plant leaves disease early.