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A Taxonomy of Machine Learning for UAV-Enabled Precision Agriculture: A Structured Survey

delete2026-06-19
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OA
AI
W
Wan D. Bae *
S
Shayma Alkobaisi
M
Muhammad Farhan Safdar
P
Prachitee Chouhan
DOI:10.3390/agriengineering8060249delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Precision agriculture increasingly relies on machine learning applied to high-resolution data acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to support crop monitoring, stress detection, and yield forecasting. This survey presents a structured review of machine learning methods for UAV-enabled precision agriculture and organizes over 100 peer-reviewed studies within a unified four-dimensional taxonomy defined by sensing modality, data type, model family, and analytical task. The taxonomy enables systematic comparison across RGB, multispectral, hyperspectral, LiDAR, and IoT data sources and across classical machine learning, deep learning, hybrid sequential models, and emerging transformer-based architectures. We analyze how modeling choices interact with data characteristics to influence robustness, cross-environment generalization, computational efficiency, and deployment feasibility on UAV and edge platforms. Recurring challenges include limited labeled data, domain shift across seasons and fields, multimodal heterogeneity, occlusion, and real-time processing constraints. We identify emerging research directions, including data-efficient learning, representation-level multimodal fusion, domain adaptation, lightweight architectures for embedded deployment, and uncertainty aware decision support. By formalizing the landscape through a unified taxonomy, this survey provides a foundation for designing scalable, robust, and deployable machine learning systems for next-generation precision agriculture.
Keywords:
precision agriculture
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
agricultural sensing systems
machine learning
crop monitoring
yield prediction
multimodal data fusion

Journal

A
AgriEngineering
IF:
3
Papers:
1.3K
Citations:
1.3K

Organization

U
United Arab Emirates University
Scholars:
8.4K
Papers: 7.1K
Citations: 10.0K
W
warsaw university of technology
Scholars:
951
Papers: 398
Citations: 0
S
Seattle University
Scholars:
516
Papers: 514
Citations: 7.8K
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