Remote Sensing and Machine Learning for Futuristic Horticulture: A Comprehensive Review

Le résumé fourni par la source

Horticultural crops—fruits, vegetables, plantation crops, flowers, spices and medicinal plants—form the nutritional and economic backbone of India's agricultural sector. However, they face persistent challenges of yield variability, water and nutrient inefficiency, pest and disease pressure and post-harvest losses. This review synthesises the transformative role of Remote Sensing (RS) and Machine Learning (ML) in enabling futuristic, sustainable and precision horticulture. The evolution of agricultural production systems from Agriculture 1.0 to Agriculture 5.0 is traced, followed by a comprehensive discussion of RS principles, elements, four fundamental resolutions (spatial, spectral, temporal, radiometric), and multi-platform architectures (satellite, aerial, UAV, ground-based). A parallel taxonomy of ML—supervised, semi-supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement and deep-learning frameworks—is presented, with emphasis on Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, XGBoost, and Convolutional Neural Network algorithms most widely applied to horticultural datasets. Five representative case studies are analysed in depth: (i) UAV multispectral + ensemble learning for leaf nitrogen monitoring in custard apple; (ii) hyperspectral + ANN / RF / DT models for mango and strawberry fruit-quality parameters; (iii) UAV-hyperspectral detection of citrus canker; (iv) machine-learning-based crop recommendation under NPK, pH and climatic variables; and (v) RS + GIS soil-site suitability for six major fruit crops in the Ganjigatti sub-watershed, Karnataka. National platforms such as CHAMAN, Bhoonidhi, Bhuvan and PMFBY are reviewed as operational demonstrations of the RS + ML value chain. Finally, technical, economic and ethical challenges—ground-truth scarcity, sensor cost, model interpretability, digital divide and data privacy—are discussed, and a way forward for Indian horticulture in the Agriculture 5.0 era is proposed.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.