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  • Topic--Crop Growth and Its Environmental Monitoring
    SHAO Mingyue, ZHANG Jianhua, FENG Quan, CHAI Xiujuan, ZHANG Ning, ZHANG Wenrong
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(1): 29-46. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202202005

    Accurate detection and recognition of plant diseases is the key technology to early diagnosis and intelligent monitoring of plant diseases, and is the core of accurate control and information management of plant diseases and insect pests. Deep learning can overcome the disadvantages of traditional diagnosis methods and greatly improve the accuracy of diseases detection and recognition, and has attracted a lot of attention of researchers. This paper collected the main public plant diseases image data sets all over the world, and briefly introduced the basic information of each data set and their websites, which is convenient to download and use. And then, the application of deep learning in plant disease detection and recognition in recent years was systematically reviewed. Plant disease target detection is the premise of accurate classification and recognition of plant disease and evaluation of disease hazard level. It is also the key to accurately locate plant disease area and guide spray device of plant protection equipment to spray drug on target. Plant disease recognition refers to the processing, analysis and understanding of disease images to identify different kinds of disease objects, which is the main basis for the timely and effective prevention and control of plant diseases. The research progress in early disease detection and recognition algorithm was expounded based on depth of learning research, as well as the advantages and existing problems of various algorithms were described. It can be seen from this review that the detection and recognition algorithm based on deep learning is superior to the traditional detection and recognition algorithm in all aspects. Based on the investigation of research results, it was pointed out that the illumination, sheltering, complex background, different disorders with similar symptoms, different changes of disease symptoms in different periods, and overlapping coexistence of multiple diseases were the main challenges for the detection and recognition of plant diseases. At the same time, the establishment of a large-scale and more complex data set that meets the specific research needs is also a difficulty that need to face together. And at further, we point out that the combination of the better performance of the neural network, large-scale data set and agriculture theoretical basis is a major trend of the development of the future. It is also pointed out that multimodal data can be used to identify early plant diseases, which is also one of the future development direction.

  • Topic--Smart Farming of Field Crops
    LI Li, LI Minzan, LIU Gang, ZHANG Man, WANG Maohua
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(4): 26-34. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202207003

    Smart farming for field crops is a significant part of the smart agriculture. It aims at crop production, integrating modern sensing technology, new generation mobile communication technology, computer and network technology, Internet of Things(IoT), big data, cloud computing, blockchain and expert wisdom and knowledge. Deeply integrated application of biotechnology, engineering technology, information technology and management technology, it realizes accurate perception, quantitative decision-making, intelligent operation and intelligent service in the process of crop production, to significantly improve land output, resource utilization and labor productivity, comprehensively improves the quality, and promotes efficiency of agricultural products. In order to promote the sustainable development of the smart farming, through the analysis of the development process of smart agriculture, the overall objectives and key tasks of the development strategy were clarified, the key technologies in smart farming were condensed. Analysis and breakthrough of smart farming key technologies were crucial to the industrial development strategy. The main problems of the smart farming for field crops include: the lack of in-situ accurate measurement technology and special agricultural sensors, the large difference between crop model and actual production, the instantaneity, reliability, universality, and stability of the information transmission technologies, and the combination of intelligent agricultural equipment with agronomy. Based on the above analysis, five primary technologies and eighteen corresponding secondary technologies of smart farming for field crops were proposed, including: sensing technologies of environmental and biological information in field, agricultural IoT technologies and mobile internet, cloud computing and cloud service technologies in agriculture, big data analysis and decision-making technology in agriculture, and intelligent agricultural machinery and agricultural robots in fireld production. According to the characteristics of China's cropping region, the corresponding smart farming development strategies were proposed: large-scale smart production development zone in the Northeast region and Inner Mongolia region, smart urban agriculture and water-saving agriculture development zone in the region of Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and Shandong, large-scale smart farming of cotton and smart dry farming green development comprehensive test zone in the Northwest arid region, smart farming of rice comprehensive development test zone in the Southeast coast region, and characteristic smart farming development zone in the Southwest mountain region. Finally, the suggestions were given from the perspective of infrastructure, key technology, talent and policy.

  • Topic--Smart Farming of Field Crops
    YIN Yanxin, MENG Zhijun, ZHAO Chunjiang, WANG Hao, WEN Changkai, CHEN Jingping, LI Liwei, DU Jingwei, WANG Pei, AN Xiaofei, SHANG Yehua, ZHANG Anqi, YAN Bingxin, WU Guangwei
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(4): 1-25. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202212005

    As one of the important way for constructing smart agriculture, unmanned farms are the most attractive in nowadays, and have been explored in many countries. Generally, data, knowledge and intelligent equipment are the core elements of unmanned farms. It deeply integrates modern information technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, edge computing, and artificial intelligence with agriculture to realize agricultural production information perception, quantitative decision-making, intelligent control, precise input and personalized services. In the paper, the overall technical architecture of unmanned farms is introduced, and five kinds of key technologies of unmanned farms are proposed, which include information perception and intelligent decision-making technology, precision control technology and key equipment for agriculture, automatic driving technology in agriculture, unmanned operation agricultural equipment, management and remote controlling system for unmanned farms. Furthermore, the latest research progress of the above technologies both worldwide are analyzed. Based on which, critical scientific and technological issues to be solved for developing unmanned farms in China are proposed, include unstructured environment perception of farmland, automatic drive for agriculture machinery in complex and changeable farmland environment, autonomous task assignment and path planning of unmanned agricultural machinery, autonomous cooperative operation control of unmanned agricultural machinery group. Those technologies are challenging and absolutely, and would be the most competitive commanding height in the future. The maize unmanned farm constructed in the city of Gongzhuling, Jilin province, China, was also introduced in detail. The unmanned farms is mainly composed of information perception system, unmanned agricultural equipment, management and controlling system. The perception system obtains and provides the farmland information, maize growth, pest and disease information of the farm. The unmanned agricultural machineries could complete the whole process of the maize mechanization under unattended conditions. The management and controlling system includes the basic GIS, remote controlling subsystem, precision operation management subsystem and working display system for unmanned agricultural machineries. The application of the maize unmanned farm has improved maize production efficiency (the harvesting efficiency has been increased by 3-4 times) and reduced labors. Finally, the paper summarizes the important role of the unmanned farm technology were summarized in solving the problems such as reduction of labors, analyzes the opportunities and challenges of developing unmanned farms in China, and put forward the strategic goals and ideas of developing unmanned farm in China.

  • Topic--Frontier Technology and Application of Agricultural Phenotype
    LI Yan, SHEN Jie, XIE Hang, GAO Guangyin, LIU Jianxiong, LIU Jie
    Smart Agriculture. 2021, 3(1): 86-95. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2021.3.1.202102-SA007

    Automatic grading method of pomelo fruit according to the shape and size is urgently needed in the industry since the work mainly depends on artificial judgment currently. In this research, a method, which detected the vertical and horizontal size of pomelo by using contour coordinate transformation fitting, fruit shape feature extraction and direction angle compensation algorithm, while it determined the shape defects based on fruit shape index, was proposed. The image acquisition system was self-designed and built up with a CMOS camera, a dot matrix LED light source, a plane mirror, the computer, a box and brackets. The image data containing whole surface information of Shatian pomelo samples with different sizes and shapes were collected by this system. The G-B component grayscale image was chosen for denoising and segmentation. The Laplacian edge detection algorithm was implemented to extract the edge pixels of the fruit. The polynomial fitting method was applied to converse the rectangular coordinates to polar coordinates so that the fruit shape description was simplified. The characteristic point polar angle value was used to compensate the random direction of the vertical and horizontal diameters of the sample. Then the vertical and horizontal diameters of fruit were calculated after classifying the sample shapes into the spherical and the pear-like categories. For the involved 168 pomelo samples, the average error, maximum absolute error and average relative error of the vertical diameters were 2.23 mm, 7.39 mm and 1.6% respectively, while these parameters of the horizontal diameters were 2.21 mm, 7.66 mm and 1.4% respectively. The fruit shape discriminant model was established by using BP neural network algorithm based on the seven features extracted from the fitting function and verified by independent validation set including 3 peak heights, 3 peak widths and 1 trough value difference. The total recognition rate of shape identification was 83.7%. The results illustrated that the method had the potential to measuring the pomelo size and shape for grading fast and non-destructively.

  • Overview Article
    HUANG Zichen, SUGIYAMA Saki
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(2): 135-149. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202202008

    Intelligent equipment is necessary to ensure stable, high-quality, and efficient production of facility agriculture. Among them, intelligent harvesting equipment needs to be designed and developed according to the characteristics of fruits and vegetables, so there is little large-scale mechanization. The intelligent harvesting equipment in Japan has nearly 40 years of research and development history since the 1980s, and the review of its research and development products has specific inspiration and reference significance. First, the preferential policies that can be used for harvesting robots in the support policies of the government and banks to promote the development of facility agriculture were introduced. Then, the development of agricultural robots in Japan was reviewed. The top ten fruits and vegetables in the greenhouse were selected, and the harvesting research of tomato, eggplant, green pepper, cucumber, melon, asparagus, and strawberry harvesting robots based on the combination of agricultural machinery and agronomy was analyzed. Next, the commercialized solutions for tomato, green pepper, and strawberry harvesting system were detailed and reviewed. Among them, taking the green pepper harvesting robot developed by the start-up company AGRIST Ltd. in recent years as an example, the harvesting robot developed by the company based on the Internet of Things technology and artificial intelligence algorithms was explained. This harvesting robot can work 24 h a day and can control the robot's operation through the network. Then, the typical strawberry harvesting robot that had undergone four generations of prototype development were reviewed. The fourth-generation system was a systematic solution developed by the company and researchers. It consisted of high-density movable seedbeds and a harvesting robot with the advantages of high space utilization, all-day work, and intelligent quality grading. The strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and future trends of prototype and industrialized solutions developed by universities were also summarized. Finally, suggestions for accelerating the development of intelligent, smart, and industrialized harvesting robots in China's facility agriculture were provided.

  • Overview Article
    GUO Yangyang, DU Shuzeng, QIAO Yongliang, LIANG Dong
    Smart Agriculture. 2023, 5(1): 52-65. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202205009

    Accurate and efficient monitoring of animal information, timely analysis of animal physiological and physical health conditions, and automatic feeding and farming management combined with intelligent technologies are of great significance for large-scale livestock farming. Deep learning techniques, with automatic feature extraction and powerful image representation capabilities, solve many visual challenges, and are more suitable for application in monitoring animal information in complex livestock farming environments. In order to further analyze the research and application of artificial intelligence technology in intelligent animal farming, this paper presents the current state of research on deep learning techniques for tag detection recognition, body condition evaluation and weight estimation, and behavior recognition and quantitative analysis for cattle, sheep and pigs. Among them, target detection and recognition is conducive to the construction of electronic archives of individual animals, on which basis the body condition and weight information, behavior information and health status of animals can be related, which is also the trend of intelligent animal farming. At present, intelligent animal farming still faces many problems and challenges, such as the existence of multiple perspectives, multi-scale, multiple scenarios and even small sample size of a certain behavior in data samples, which greatly increases the detection difficulty and the generalization of intelligent technology application. In addition, animal breeding and animal habits are a long-term process. How to accurately monitor the animal health information in real time and effectively feed it back to the producer is also a technical difficulty. According to the actual feeding and management needs of animal farming, the development of intelligent animal farming is prospected and put forward. First, enrich the samples and build a multi perspective dataset, and combine semi supervised or small sample learning methods to improve the generalization ability of in-depth learning models, so as to realize the perception and analysis of the animal's physical environment. Secondly, the unified cooperation and harmonious development of human, intelligent equipment and breeding animals will improve the breeding efficiency and management level as a whole. Third, the deep integration of big data, deep learning technology and animal farming will greatly promote the development of intelligent animal farming. Last, research on the interpretability and security of artificial intelligence technology represented by deep learning model in the breeding field. And other development suggestions to further promote intelligent animal farming. Aiming at the progress of research application of deep learning in livestock smart farming, it provides reference for the modernization and intelligent development of livestock farming.

  • CHEN Feng, SUN Chuanheng, XING Bin, LUO Na, LIU Haishen
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(4): 126-137. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202206006

    As an emerging concept, metaverse has attracted extensive attention from industry, academia and scientific research field. The combination of agriculture and metaverse will greatly promote the development of agricultural informatization and agricultural intelligence, provide new impetus for the transformation and upgrading of agricultural intelligence. Firstly, to expound feasibility of the application research of metaverse in agriculture, the basic principle and key technologies of agriculture metaverse were briefly described, such as blockchain, non-fungible token, 5G/6G, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, 3D reconstruction, cloud computing, edge computing, augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, brain computer interface, digital twins and parallel system. Then, the main scenarios of three agricultural applications of metaverse in the fields of virtual farm, agricultural teaching system and agricultural product traceability system were discussed. Among them, virtual farm is one of the most important applications of agricultural metaverse. Agricultural metaverse can help the growth of crops and the raising of livestock and poultry in the field of agricultural production, provide a three-dimensional and visual virtual leisure agricultural experience, provide virtual characters in the field of agricultural product promotion. The agricultural metaverse teaching system can provide virtual agricultural teaching similar to natural scenes, save training time and improve training efficiency by means of fragmentation. Traceability of agricultural products can let consumers know the production information of agricultural products and feel more confident about enterprises and products. Finally, the challenges in the development of agricultural metaverse were summarized in the aspects of difficulties in establishing agricultural metaverse system, weak communication foundation of agricultural metaverse, immature agricultural metaverse hardware equipment and uncertain agricultural meta universe operation, and the future development directions of agricultural metaverse were prospected. In the future, researches on the application of metaverse, agricultural growth mechanism, and low power wireless communication technologies are suggested to be carried out. A rural broadband network covering households can be established. The industrialization application of agricultural meta universe can be promoted. This review can provide theoretical references and technical supports for the development of metaverse in the field of agriculture.

  • Topic--Smart Animal Husbandry Key Technologies and Equipment
    MA Weihong, LI Jiawei, WANG Zhiquan, GAO Ronghua, DING Luyu, YU Qinyang, YU Ligen, LAI Chengrong, LI Qifeng
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(2): 99-109. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202203005

    Focusing on the low level of management and informatization and intelligence of the beef cattle industry in China, a big data platform for commercial beef cattle breeding, referring to the experience of international advanced beef cattle breeding countries, was proposed in this research. The functions of the platform includes integrating germplasm resources of beef cattle, automatic collecting of key beef cattle breeding traits, full-service support for the beef cattle breeding process, formation of big data analysis and decision-making system for beef cattle germplasm resources, and joint breeding innovation model. Aiming at the backward storage and sharing methods of beef cattle breeding data and incomplete information records in China, an information resource integration platform and an information database for beef cattle germplasm were established. Due to the vagueness and subjectivity of the breeding performance evaluation standard, a scientific online evaluation technology of beef cattle breeding traits and a non-contact automatic acquisition and intelligent calculation method were proposed. Considering the lack of scientific and systematic breeding planning and guidance for farmers in China, a full-service support system for beef cattle breeding and nanny-style breeding guidance during beef cattle breeding was developed. And an interactive progressive decision-making method for beef cattle breeding to solve the lack of data accumulation of beef cattle germplasm was proposed. The main body of breeding and farming enterprises was not closely integrated, according to that, the innovative breeding model of regional integration was explored. The idea of commercial beef cattle breeding big data software platform and the technological and model innovation content were also introduced. The technology innovations included the deep mining of germplasm resources data and improved breed management pedigree, the automatic acquisition and evaluation technology of non-contact breeding traits, the fusion of multi-source heterogeneous information to provide intelligent decision support. The future goal is to form a sustainable information solution for China's beef cattle breeding industry and improve the overall level of China's beef cattle breeding industry.

  • Invited Article
    Lan Yubin, Deng Xiaoling, Zeng Guoliang
    Smart Agriculture. 2019, 1(2): 1-19. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2019.1.2.201904-SA003

    Rapid acquisition and analysis of crop information is the precondition and basis for carrying out precision agricultural practice. Variable spraying and agricultural operation management based on the actual degree of crop diseases, pests and weeds can reduce the cost of agricultural production, optimize crop cultivation, improve crop yield and quality, and thus achieve precise agricultural management. In recent years, with the rapid development of UAV industry, UAV agricultural remote sensing technologies have played an important role in monitoring crop diseases, insects and weeds because of high spatial resolution, strong timeliness and low cost. Firstly, this research introduces the basic idea and system composition of precision agricultural aviation, and the status of UAV remote sensing in precision agricultural aviation. Then, the common UAV remote sensing imaging and interpreting methods were discussed, and the progress of UAV agricultural remote sensing technologies in detecting crop diseases, pests and weeds were respectively expounded. Finally, the challenges in the development of UAV agricultural remote sensing technologies nowadays were summarized, and the future development directions of UAV agricultural remote sensing were prospected. This research can provide theoretical references and technical supports for the development of UAV remote sensing technology in the field of precision agricultural aviation.

  • Special Issue--Key Technologies and Equipment for Smart Orchard
    HAN Leng, HE Xiongkui, WANG Changling, LIU Yajia, SONG Jianli, QI Peng, LIU Limin, LI Tian, ZHENG Yi, LIN Guihai, ZHOU Zhan, HUANG Kang, WANG Zhong, ZHA Hainie, ZHANG Guoshan, ZHOU Guotao, MA Yong, FU Hao, NIE Hongyuan, ZENG Aijun, ZHANG Wei
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(3): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA200201014

    Traditional orchard production is facing problems of labor shortage due to the aging, difficulties in the management of agricultural equipment and production materials, and low production efficiency which can be expected to be solved by building a smart orchard that integrates technologies of Internet of Things(IoT), big data, equipment intelligence, et al. In this study, based on the objectives of full mechanization and intelligent management, a smart orchard was built in Pinggu district, an important peaches and pears fruit producing area of Beijing. The orchard covers an aera of more than 30 hm2 in Xiying village, Yukou town. In the orchard, more than 10 kinds of information acquisition sensors for pests, diseases, water, fertilizers and medicines are applied, 28 kinds of agricultural machineries with intelligent technical support are equipped. The key technologies used include: intelligent information acquisition system, integrated water and fertilizer management system and intelligent pest management system. The intelligent operation equipment system includes: unmanned lawn mower, intelligent anti-freeze machine, trenching and fertilizer machine, automatic driving crawler, intelligent profiling variable sprayer, six-rotor branch-to-target drone, multi-functional picking platform and finishing and pruning machine, etc. At the same time, an intelligent management platform has been built in the smart orchard. The comparison results showed that, smart orchard production can reduce labor costs by more than 50%, save pesticide dosage by 30% ~ 40%, fertilizer dosage by 25% ~ 35%, irrigation water consumption by 60% ~ 70%, and comprehensive economic benefits increased by 32.5%. The popularization and application of smart orchards will further promote China's fruit production level and facilitate the development of smart agriculture in China.

  • ZHAO Ruixue, YANG Chenxue, ZHENG Jianhua, LI Jiao, WANG Jian
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(4): 105-125. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202207009

    The wide application of advanced information technologies such as big data, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence in agriculture has promoted the modernization of agriculture in rural areas and the development of smart agriculture. This trend has also led to the boost of demands for technology and knowledge from a large amount of agricultural business entities. Faced with problems such as dispersiveness of knowledges, hysteric knowledge update, inadequate agricultural information service and prominent contradiction between supply and demand of knowledge, the agricultural knowledge service has become an important engine for the transformation, upgrading and high-quality development of agriculture. To better facilitate the agriculture modernization in China, the research and application perspectives of agricultural knowledge services were summarized and analyzed. According to the whole life cycle of agricultural data, based on the whole agricultural industry chain, a systematic framework for the construction of agricultural intelligent knowledge service systems towards the requirement of agricultural business entities was proposed. Three layers of techniques in necessity were designed, ranging from AIoT-based agricultural situation perception to big data aggregation and governance, and from agricultural knowledge organization to computation/mining based on knowledge graph and then to multi-scenario-based agricultural intelligent knowledge service. A wide range of key technologies with comprehensive discussion on their applications in agricultural intelligent knowledge service were summarized, including the aerial and ground integrated Artificial Intelligence & Internet-of-Things (AIoT) full-dimensional of agricultural condition perception, multi-source heterogeneous agricultural big data aggregation/governance, knowledge modeling, knowledge extraction, knowledge fusion, knowledge reasoning, cross-media retrieval, intelligent question answering, personalized recommendation, decision support. At the end, the future development trends and countermeasures were discussed, from the aspects of agricultural data acquisition, model construction, knowledge organization, intelligent knowledge service technology and application promotion. It can be concluded that the agricultural intelligent knowledge service is the key to resolve the contradiction between supply and demand of agricultural knowledge service, can provide support in the realization of the advance from agricultural cross-media data analytics to knowledge reasoning, and promote the upgrade of agricultural knowledge service to be more personalized, more precise and more intelligent. Agricultural knowledge service is also an important support for agricultural science and technologies to be more self-reliance, modernized, and facilitates substantial development and upgrading of them in a more effective manner.

  • Overview Article
    Cao Hongxin, Ge Daokuo, Zhang Wenyu, Zhang Weixin, Cao Jing, Liang Wanjie, Xuan Shouli, Liu Yan, Wu Qian, Sun Chuanliang, Zhang Lingling, Xia Ji‘an, Liu Yongxia, Chen Yuli, Yue Yanbin, Zhang Zhiyou, Wan Qian, Pan Yue, Han Xujie, Wu Fei
    Smart Agriculture. 2020, 2(1): 147-162. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2020.2.1.202002-SA006

    Agricultural models, agricultural artificial intelligent, and data analysis technology, etc., exist in whole processes of information perceiving, transmission, processing and control for smart agriculture, thus they are the core technology of smart agriculture. To furtherly make the substances and functions of agricultural models clear, facilitate its further research and application, drive smart agriculture development with healthy, steady, and sustainable, methods of systematic analysis, comparison, and chart for relationship, etc. were used in this research. The definition, classification, functions of the agricultural models were theoretically analyzed. The relationships between the agricultural models and the elements and processes of the smart agriculture were expounded, which made the functions of agricultural models clear, provided some agricultural models examples applied in the smart agriculture. The important studies and application progresses of agricultural models were reviewed. The comparison results of agricultural models showed that the 4 levels of agricultural biological elements, 6 scales of agricultural environmental elements, 6 administrative levels of agricultural technological and economic elements, and the relevant approaches for modeling agricultural system need to be considered. The research and application of multi-space scales on environment elements in the agricultural models would have the larger potential. The combination of agricultural models with molecular genetics, perceiving, and artificial intelligence, the collaboration among public and private researchers, and food security challenges have been an important power for further development of agricultural models, linking agricultural models with various agricultural system modeling, databases, harmonious and open data, and decision-making support systems (DSS) would be focus on. The research and application of the agricultural models in China have formed crop model series with Chinese characteristics, joined in the world trends of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), the smart agriculture, and so on. They should be speedy graspe chances and accelerate development. The agricultural models is a quantitative express of relationships within or among the agricultural system elements. An important method with epistemological values of quantifying and synthesizing agricultural sciences, and will play an indispensible role in data achieving and processing for the smart agriculture combining perceiving techniques, and become a significant bridge and bond.

  • Topic--Crop Growth and Its Environmental Monitoring
    CHEN Ailian, ZHAO Sijian, ZHU Yuxia, SUN Wei, ZHANG jing, ZHANG Qiao
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(1): 57-70. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202201011

    Plant income insurance has become an important part of agricultural insurance in China. It has been recommended to pilot since 2016 by Chinese government in several counties, and is now (2022) required to be implemented in all major grain producing counties in the 13 major grain producing provinces. The measurement of yield for plant income insurance in such huge volume urgently needs the support of remote sensing technology. Therefore, the development history and application status of remote sensing technology in the whole agricultural insurance industry was reviewed to help understanding the whole context circumstances of plant income insurance firstly. Then, the application scenarios of remote sensing technology were analyzed, and the key remote sensing technologies involved were introduced. The technologies involved include crop field plot extraction, crop classification, crop disaster estimation, and crop yield estimation. Research progress of these technologies were reviewed and summarized,and the satellite data sources that most commonly used in plant income insurance were summarized as well. It was found that to obtain a better support for a development of plant income insurance as well as all crop insurance from remote sensing communities, issues existed not only in the involved remote sensing technologies, but also in the remote sensing industry as well as the insurance industry. The most two important technical problems in the current application scenario of planting income insurance are that: the plot extraction and crop classification are not automated enough; the yield estimation mechanism is not strong, and the accuracy is not high. At the industry level, the first issue is the limitation of the remote sensing technology itself in that the remote sensing is not almighty, suffering from limited data source, either from satellite or from other platform, laborious data preprocessing, and pricey data fees for most of the data, and the second is the compatibility between the current business of the insurance industry and the combination of remote sensing. In this regard, this paper proposed in total five specific suggestions, which are: 1st, to establish a data distribution platform to solve the problems of difficult data acquisition and processing and standardization of initial data; 2nd, to improve the sample database to promote the automation of plot extraction and crop classification; 3rd, to achieve faster, more accurate and more scientific yields through multidisciplinary research; 4th, to standardize remote sensing technology application in agricultural insurance, and 5th, to write remote sensing applications in crop insurance contract. With these improvements, the application mode of plant income insurance and probably the whole agriculture insurance would run in a way with easily available data, more automated and intelligent technology, standards to follow, and contract endorsements.

  • Topic--Smart Animal Husbandry Key Technologies and Equipment
    YANG Liang, XIONG Benhai, WANG Hui, CHEN Ruipeng, ZHAO Yiguang
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(2): 86-98. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202204001

    The production mode of livestock breeding has changed from extensive to intensive, and the production level is improved. However, low labor productivity and labor shortage have seriously restricted the rapid development of China's livestock breeding industry. As a new intelligent agricultural machinery equipment, agricultural robot integrates advanced technologies, such as intelligent monitoring, automatic control, image recognition technology, environmental modeling algorithm, sensors, flexible execution, etc. Using modern information and artificial intelligence technology, developing livestock feeding and pushing robots, realizing digital and intelligent livestock breeding, improving livestock breeding productivity are the main ways to solve the above contradiction. In order to deeply analyze the research status of robot technology in livestock breeding, products and literature were collected worldwide. This paper mainly introduced the research progress of livestock feeding robot from three aspects: Rail feeding robot, self-propelled feeding robot and pushing robot, and analyzed the technical characteristics and practical application of feeding robot.The rail feeding robot runs automatically along the fixed track, identifies the target animal, positions itself, and accurately completes feed delivery through preset programs to achieve accurate feeding of livestock. The self-propelled feeding robot can walk freely in the farm and has automatic navigation and positioning functions. The system takes single chip microcomputer as the control core and realizes automatic walking by sensor and communication module. Compared with the rail feeding robot, the feeding process is more flexible, convenient and technical, which is more conducive to the promotion and application of livestock farms. The pushing robot will automatically push the feed to the feeding area, promote the increase of feed intake of livestock, and effectively reduce the labor demand of the farm. By comparing the feeding robots of developed countries and China from two aspects of technology and application, it is found that China has achieved some innovation in technology, while developted countries do better in product application. The development of livestock robot was prospected. In terms of strategic planning, it is necessary to keep up with the international situation and the trend of technological development, and formulate the agricultural robot development strategic planning in line with China's national conditions. In terms of the development of core technologies, more attention should be paid to the integration of information perception, intelligent sensors and deep learning algorithms to realize human-computer interaction. In terms of future development trends, it is urgent to strengthen innovation, improve the friendliness and intelligence of the robot, and improve the learning ability of the robot. To sum up, intelligent livestock feeding and pushing machine operation has become a cutting-edge technology in the field of intelligent agriculture, which will surely lead to a new round of agricultural production technology reform, promote the transformation and upgrading of China's livestock industry. .

  • Special Issue--Agricultural Robot and Smart Equipment
    FENG Qingchun, WANG Xiu, QIU Quan, ZHANG Chunfeng, LI Bin, XU Ruifeng, CHEN Liping
    Smart Agriculture. 2020, 2(4): 79-88. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2020.2.4.202010-SA005

    In order to improve the efficiency and safety of epidemic prevention and disinfection operations for livestock and poultry breeding, the disinfection robot system and the automatic disinfecting mode were researched in this study. The robot system is composed of four components, namely the automatic bearing vehicle, the disinfection spraying unit, the environmental monitoring sensors, and the controller. The robot supports two working modes: fully automatic mode and remote control mode. Aiming at the low-light and low-stress condition in the livestock and poultry houses, the method for detecting navigation path based on "Magnet-RFID" marks in the ground was proposed to realize the robot's automatic moving between the cages. In view of the large-flow and long-range requirements of the disinfectant's spraying, the air-assisted nozzle was designed, which could atomize and disperse the liquid independently. Based on the CFD simulation of airflow in the nozzle, the nozzle's parts structural parameters were optimized, as the angle of the cone-shaped guide pad and the inclination angle of the grid respectively determined as 75°and 90°. Finally, the robot's performance was tested in a poultry house in Beijing. The results showed that, the robot's mobile platform could automatically navigate at the speed of 0.1-0.5 m/s, and the maximal deviation distance between the actual trajectory and the expected path was 50.8 mm. The air-assisted nozzle could realize the atomization and diffusion of the liquid medicine at the same time, and was suitable for spraying the liquid medicine with a flow rate of 200-400 mL/min. The diameter (DV.9) of the liquid droplets formed was 51.82-137.23 μL, and became larger as the flow rate of the liquid medicine increased. The deposition density of spray droplets formed by the nozzle was 116-149/cm2, and decreased as the spray distance increased. The size and density of the liquid droplets of the spray nozzle in different areas of the cage all met the index requirements for effectively killing adherent pathogenic microorganisms. The robot could be applied as an automatic sprayer for disinfectant and immune reagent in the livestock and poultry house.

  • Zhang Donghong
    Chinese Agricultural Science Bulletin. 2015, 31(5): 234-242. https://doi.org/10.11924/j.issn.1000-6850.2014-2633
    In the development of global informatization construction, wide attention on the “digital divide” is mainly after a series of famous reports about 《Falling through the net》 published by NTIA. The digital divide is also an important research topic in the information construction in China. In the administrative process of townships, the digital divide phenomenon exists objectively. This article is to do a simple analysis and elaboration on China's digital divide, including divide macro background, the digitalization construction of township, the digital divide in the e-government construction and the digital divide close etc. The results showed that the digital divide phenomenon exists between China and developed countries, among different regions and different groups, in the process of internet using and popularization. The digital divide phenomenon exists objectively during the Chinese basic township government administrative process. It includes "external" and "internal" digital divide, cannot be completely eliminated, but can be narrowed by government-led efforts, strengthened capital investment, active learning of foreign advanced experience and joint social strength from all walks of life.
  • Information Processing and Decision Making
    ZHANG Xiaoqing, SHAO Song, GUO Xinyu, FAN Jiangchuan
    Smart Agriculture. 2021, 3(2): 88-99. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2021.3.2.202103-SA003

    At present, the dynamic detection and monitoring of maize seedling mainly rely on manual observation, which is time-consuming and laborious, and only small quadrats can be selected to estimate the overall emergence situation. In this research, two kinds of data sources, the high-time-series RGB images obtained by the plant high-throughput phenotypic platform (HTPP) and the RGB images obtained by the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform, were used to construct the image data set of maize seedling process under different light conditions. Considering the complex background and uneven illumination in the field environment, a residual unit based on the Faster R-CNN was built and ResNet50 was used as a new feature extraction network to optimize Faster R-CNN to realize the detection and counting of maize seedlings in complex field environment. Then, based on the high time series image data obtained by the HTPP, the dynamic continuous monitoring of maize seedlings of different varieties and densities was carried out, and the seedling duration and uniformity of each maize variety were evaluated and analyzed. The experimental results showed that the recognition accuracy of the proposed method was 95.67% in sunny days and 91.36% in cloudy days when it was applied to the phenotypic platform in the field. When applied to the UAV platform to monitor the emergence of maize, the recognition accuracy of sunny and cloudy days was 91.43% and 89.77% respectively. The detection accuracy of the phenotyping platform image was higher, which could meet the needs of automatic detection of maize emergence in actual application scenarios. In order to further verify the robustness and generalization of the model, HTPP was used to obtain time series data, and the dynamic emergence of maize was analyzed. The results showed that the dynamic emergence results obtained by HTPP were consistent with the manual observation results, which shows that the model proposed in this research is robust and generalizable.

  • Information Processing and Decision Making
    QIU Wenjie, YE Jin, HU Liangqing, YANG Juan, LI Qili, MO Jianyou, YI Wanmao
    Smart Agriculture. 2021, 3(1): 109-117. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2021.3.1.202009-SA004

    The development of convolutional neural networks(CNN) has brought a large number of network parameters and huge model volumes, which greatly limites the application on devices with small computing resources, such as single-chip microcomputers and mobile devices. In order to solve the problem, a structured model compression method was studied in this research. Its core idea was using knowledge distillation to transfer the knowledge from the complex integrated model to a lightweight small-scale neural network. Firstly, VGG16 was used to train a teacher model with a higher recognition rate, whose volume was much larger than the student model. Then the knowledge in the model was transfered to MobileNet by using distillation. The parameters number of the VGG16 model was greatly reduced. The knowledge-distilled model was named Distilled-MobileNet, and was applied to the classification task of 38 common diseases (powdery mildew, Huanglong disease, etc.) of 14 crops (soybean, cucumber, tomato, etc.). The performance test of knowledge distillation on four different network structures of VGG16, AlexNet, GoogleNet, and ResNet showed that when VGG16 was used as a teacher model, the accuracy of the model was improved to 97.54%. Using single disease recognition rate, average accuracy rate, model memory and average recognition time as 4 indicators to evaluate the accuracy of the trained Distilled-MobileNet model in a real environment, the results showed that, the average accuracy of the model reached 97.62%, and the average recognition time was shortened to 0.218 s, only accounts for 13.20% of the VGG16 model, and the model size was reduced to only 19.83 MB, which was 93.60% smaller than VGG16. Compared with traditional neural networks, distilled-mobile model has a significant improvement in reducing size and shorting recognition time, and can provide a new idea for disease recognition on devices with limited memory and computing resources.

  • Special Issue--Key Technologies and Equipment for Smart Orchard
    LIU Limin, HE Xiongkui, LIU Weihong, LIU Ziyan, HAN Hu, LI Yangfan
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(3): 63-74. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202207008

    To realize the autonomous navigation and automatic target spraying of intelligent plant protect machinery in orchard, in this study, an autonomous navigation and automatic target spraying robot for orchards was developed. Firstly, a single 3D light detection and ranging (LiDAR) was used to collect fruit trees and other information around the robot. The region of interest (ROI) was determined using information on the fruit trees in the orchard (plant spacing, plant height, and row spacing), as well as the fundamental LiDAR parameters. Additionally, it must be ensured that LiDAR was used to detect the canopy information of a whole fruit tree in the ROI. Secondly, the point clouds within the ROI was two-dimension processing to obtain the fruit tree center of mass coordinates. The coordinate was the location of the fruit trees. Based on the location of the fruit trees, the row lines of fruit tree were obtained by random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm. The center line (navigation line) of the fruit tree row within ROI was obtained through the fruit tree row lines. The robot was controlled to drive along the center line by the angular velocity signal transmitted from the computer. Next, the ATRS's body speed and position were determined by encoders and the inertial measurement unit (IMU). And the collected fruit tree zoned canopy information was corrected by IMU. The presence or absence of fruit tree zoned canopy was judged by the logical algorithm designed. Finally, the nozzles were controlled to spray or not according to the presence or absence of corresponding zoned canopy. The conclusions were obtained. The maximum lateral deviation of the robot during autonomous navigation was 21.8 cm, and the maximum course deviation angle was 4.02°. Compared with traditional spraying, the automatic target spraying designed in this study reduced pesticide volume, air drift and ground loss by 20.06%, 38.68% and 51.40%, respectively. There was no significant difference between the automatic target spraying and the traditional spraying in terms of the percentage of air drift. In terms of the percentage of ground loss, automatic target spraying had 43% at the bottom of the test fruit trees and 29% and 28% at the middle of the test fruit trees and the left and right neighboring fruit trees. But in traditional spraying, the percentage of ground loss was, in that sequence, 25%, 38%, and 37%. The robot developted can realize autonomous navigation while ensuring the spraying effect, reducing the pesticides volume and loss.

  • Special Issue--Key Technologies and Equipment for Smart Orchard
    SHANG Fengnan, ZHOU Xuecheng, LIANG Yingkai, XIAO Mingwei, CHEN Qiao, LUO Chendi
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(3): 120-131. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202207001

    Dragon fruit detection in natural environment is the prerequisite for fruit harvesting robots to perform harvesting. In order to improve the harvesting efficiency, by improving YOLOX (You Only Look Once X) network, a target detection network with an attention module was proposed in this research. As the benchmark, YOLOX-Nano network was chose to facilitate deployment on embedded devices, and the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) was added to the backbone feature extraction network of YOLOX-Nano, which improved the robustness of the model to dragon fruit target detection to a certain extent. The correlation of features between different channels was learned by weight allocation coefficients of features of different scales, which were extracted for the backbone network. Moreover, the transmission of deep information of network structure was strengthened, which aimed at reducing the interference of dragon fruit recognition in the natural environment as well as improving the accuracy and speed of detection significantly. The performance evaluation and comparison test of the method were carried out. The results showed that, after training, the dragon fruit target detection network got an AP0.5 value of 98.9% in the test set, an AP0.5:0.95 value of 72.4% and F1 score was 0.99. Compared with other YOLO network models under the same experimental conditions, on the one hand, the improved YOLOX-Nano network model proposed in this research was more lightweight, on the other hand, the detection accuracy of this method surpassed that of YOLOv3, YOLOv4 and YOLOv5 respectively. The average detection accuracy of the improved YOLOX-Nano target detection network was the highest, reaching 98.9%, 26.2% higher than YOLOv3, 9.8% points higher than YOLOv4-Tiny, and 7.9% points higher than YOLOv5-S. Finally, real-time tests were performed on videos with different input resolutions. The improved YOLOX-Nano target detection network proposed in this research had an average detection time of 21.72 ms for a single image. In terms of the size of the network model was only 3.76 MB, which was convenient for deployment on embedded devices. In conclusion, not only did the improved YOLOX-Nano target detection network model accurately detect dragon fruit under different lighting and occlusion conditions, but the detection speed and detection accuracy showed in this research could able to meet the requirements of dragon fruit harvesting in natural environment requirements at the same time, which could provide some guidance for the design of the dragon fruit harvesting robot.

  • Topic--Agricultural Artificial Intelligence and Big Data
    LI Daoliang, LIU Chang
    Smart Agriculture. 2020, 2(3): 1-20. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2020.2.3.202004-SA007

    The production of China's aquaculture has changed from extensive model to intensive model, the production structure is continuously adjusting and upgrading, and the production level has been continuously improved. However, as an important part of China's agricultural production, aquaculture plays an important role in promoting the development of China's agricultural economy. Low labor productivity, production efficiency and resource utilization, low-quality aquatic products, and the lack of safety guarantees have severely limited the rapid development of China's aquaculture industry. Using modern information technology and intelligent devices to realize precise, automated, and intelligent aquaculture, improving fishery productivity and resource utilization is the main way to solve the above contradictions. Artificial intelligence technology in aquaculture is to use the computer technology to realize the production process of aquaculture, monitor the growth of underwater organisms, judge, discuss and analyze problems, and then perform feeding, disease treatment, and breeding. In order to understand the development status and technical characteristics of artificial intelligence technology in aquaculture, in this article, five main aspects of aquaculture, i.e., life information acquisition, aquatic product growth regulation and decision-making, fish disease prediction and diagnosis, aquaculture environment perception and regulation, and aquaculture underwater robots, combined with the practical problems in aquaculture, were mainly focused on. The application principles and necessity of artificial intelligence technology in each aspect were explained. Commonly used technical methods were point out and the classic application cases were deeply analyzed. The main problems, bottlenecks and challenges in the current development of artificial intelligence technology in aquaculture were analyzed, including turbid water, multiple interference factors, corrosion of equipment, and movement of underwater animals, etc., and reasonable research directions for these potential challenges were pointed out. In addition, the main strategic strategies to promote the transformation of aquaculture were also proposed. The development of aquaculture is inseparable from artificial intelligence technology, this review can provide references to accelerate the advancement of digitalization, precision and intelligent aquaculture.

  • Information Processing and Decision Making
    XU Yulin, KANG Mengzhen, WANG Xiujuan, HUA Jing, WANG Haoyu, SHEN Zhen
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(4): 156-163. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA20220712

    Corn and soybean are upland grain in the same season, and the contradiction of scrambling for land between corn and soybean is prominent in China, so it is necessary to explore the price relations between corn and soybean. In addition, agricultural futures have the function of price discovery compared with the spot. Therefore, the analysis and prediction of corn and soybean futures prices are of great significance for the management department to adjust the planting structure and for farmers to select the crop varieties. In this study, the correlation between corn and soybean futures prices was analyzed, and it was found that the corn and soybean futures prices have a strong correlation by correlation test, and soybean futures price is the Granger reason of corn futures price by Granger causality test. Then, the corn and soybean futures prices were predicted using a long short-term memory (LSTM) model. To optimize the futures price prediction model performance, Attention mechanism was introduced as Attention-LSTM to assign weights to the outputs of the LSTM model at different times. Specifically, LSTM model was used to process the input sequence of futures prices, the Attention layer assign different weights to the outputs, and then the model output the prediction results after a layer of linearity. The experimental results showed that Attention-LSTM model could significantly improve the prediction performance of both corn and soybean futures prices compared to autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA), support vector regression model (SVR), and LSTM. For example, mean absolute error (MAE) was improved by 3.8% and 3.3%, root mean square error (RMSE) was improved by 0.6% and 1.8% and mean absolute error percentage (MAPE) was improved by 4.8% and 2.9% compared with a single LSTM, respectively. Finally, the corn futures prices were forecasted using historical corn and soybean futures prices together. Specifically, two LSTM models were used to process the input sequences of corn futures prices and soybean futures prices respectively, two parameters were trained to perform a weighted summation of the output of two LSTM models, and the prediction results were output by the model after a layer of linearity. The experimental results showed that MAE was improved by 6.9%, RMSE was improved by 1.1% and MAPE was improved by 5.3% compared with the LSTM model using only corn futures prices. The results verify the strong correlation between corn and soybean futures prices at the same time. In conclusion, the results verify the Attention-LSTM model can improve the performances of soybean and corn futures price forecasting compared with the general prediction model, and the combination of related agricultural futures price data can improve the prediction performances of agricultural product futures forecasting model.

  • Topic--Smart Farming of Field Crops
    LIU Xiaohang, ZHANG Zhao, LIU Jiaying, ZHANG Man, LI Han, FLORES Paulo, HAN Xiongzhe
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(4): 49-60. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202207004

    Machine vision has been increasingly used for agricultural sensing tasks. The detection method based on deep learning for infield corn kernels can improve the detection accuracy. In order to obtain the number of lost corn kernels quickly and accurately after the corn harvest, and evaluate the corn harvest combine performance on grain loss, the method of directly using deep learning technology to count corn kernels in the field was developed and evaluated. Firstly, an RGB camera was used to collect image with different backgrounds and illuminations, and the datasets were generated. Secondly, different target detection networks for kernel recognition were constructed, including Mask R-CNN, EfficientDet-D5, YOLOv5-L and YOLOX-L, and the collected 420 effective images were used to train, verify and test each model. The number of images in train, verify and test datasets were 200, 40 and 180, respectively. Finally, the counting performances of different models were evaluated and compared according to the recognition results of test set images. The experimental results showed that among the four models, YOLOv5-L had overall the best performance, and could reliably identify corn kernels under different scenes and light conditions. The average precision (AP) value of the model for the image detection of the test set was 78.3%, and the size of the model was 89.3 MB. The correct rate of kernel count detection in four scenes of non-occlusion, surface mid-level-occlusion, surface severe-occlusion and aggregation were 98.2%, 95.5%, 76.1% and 83.3%, respectively, and F1 values were 94.7%, 93.8%, 82.8% and 87%, respectively. The overall detection correct rate and F1 value of the test set were 90.7% and 91.1%, respectively. The frame rate was 55.55 f/s, and the detection and counting performance were better than Mask R-CNN, EfficientDet-D5 and YOLOX-L networks. The detection accuracy was improved by about 5% compared with the second best performance of Mask R-CNN. With good precision, high throughput, and proven generalization, YOLOv5-L can realize real-time monitoring of corn harvest loss in practical operation.

  • Overview Article
    Li Kailiang, Shu Lei, Huang Kai, Sun Yuanhao, Yang Fan, Zhang Yu, Huo Zhiqiang, Wang Yanfei, Wang Xinyi, Lu Qiaoling, Zhang Yacheng
    Smart Agriculture. 2019, 1(3): 13-28. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2019.1.3.201905-SA001

    Along with the increasing awareness of environmental protection and growing demand for green and pollution-free agricultural products, it has a great need to explore new ways to apply greener pest control methods in agricultural production. Researching on Solar Insecticidal Lamps (SILs) has continuously received incremental attentions from both the academia and industry, which brings a new mode for the preventing and controlling of agricultural migratory pests with phototaxis feature, and now is becoming to a hot research topic. Towards the fast development of "precision agriculture" and "smart agriculture" as well as the increasing demands for agricultural informatization, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been widely used for agricultural information collection and intelligent control of agricultural equipment. WSNs are suitable for large-scale deployment and regional monitoring, which can be easily combined with SIL nodes. Based on the combination, a new type of agricultural Internet of things - Solar Insecticidal Lamps Internet of Things (SIL-IoTs) was proposed and the technology of WSNs for the prevention and control of phototactic migratory pests in agricultural applications were surveyed. Firstly, the state-of-art insecticidal lamps applications was reviewed and their characteristics deployment manners and working lifetime in the production of crops (e.g., forest, fruits, rice, vegetables) were summarized. Secondly, the characteristics of existing GSM/3G/4G-enabled SIL nodes and their latest research status on SIL-IoTs were summarized. Furthermore, the research status was analyzed concerning the energy harvesting mode and deployment characteristics of SIL, which are solar energy SIL harvesting mode for energy saving and the heuristic mode for node deployment, respectively. Finally, towards the fast-developed vision of smart agriculture, in which various emerging IT and automation technologies are maturely applied, SIL-IoTs can be considered as a new and important component to contribute to the green agricultural pest monitoring and control. To further enhance SIL-IoTs' capability and enrich SIL-IoTs' function, four open research issues on SIL-IoTs were proposed, i.e., 1) optimized deployment scheme of SIL-IoTs with multiple constrains, 2) optimized and adaptive energy management strategy for ensuring normal working hours of SIL node, 3) lack of algorithms for pests outbreak area localization, and 4) interference on data transmission because of dense high voltage discharge during severe pest disaster. To sum up, SIL-IoTs is one of the representative applications of "precision agriculture" and "smart agriculture" based on WSNs, which is a new model on prevention and control of pests. The combination of both optimized deployment algorithms of SIL-IoTs nodes and artificial intelligence techniques will provide a theoretical basis for SIL-based applications in terms of optimized deployment and energy management. Intelligent pest information collection, alarm, and node' senergy management via SIL-IoTs will facilitate decisions-makings for precise agricultural applications in prevention and control of pests.

  • Topic--Crop Growth and Its Environmental Monitoring
    ZHOU Qiaoli, MA Li, CAO Liying, YU Helong
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(1): 47-56. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202202003

    Timely detection and treatment of tomato diseases can effectively improve the quality and yield of tomato. In order to realize the real-time and non-destructive detection of tomato diseases, a tomato leaf disease classification and recognition method based on improved MobileNetV3 was proposed in this study. Firstly, the lightweight convolutional neural network MobileNetV3 was used for transfer learning on the image net data set. The network was initialized according to the weight of the pre training model, so as to realize the transfer and fine adjustment of large-scale shared parameters of the model. The training method of transfer learning could effectively alleviate the problem of model over fitting caused by insufficient data, realized the accurate classification of tomato leaf diseases in a small number of samples, and saved the time cost of network training. Under the same experimental conditions, compared with the three standard deep convolution network models of VGG16, ResNet50 and Inception-V3, the results showed that the overall performance of MobileNetV3 was the best. Next, the impact of the change of loss function and the change of data amplification mode on the identification of tomato leaf diseases were observed by using MobileNetV3 convolution network. For the test of loss value, focal loss and cross entropy function were used for comparison, and for the test of data enhancement, conventional data amplification and mixup hybrid enhancement were used for comparison. After testing, using Mixup enhancement method under focal loss function could improve the recognition accuracy of the model, and the average test recognition accuracy of 10 types of tomato diseases under Mixup hybrid enhancement and focal loss function was 94.68%. On the basis of transfer learning, continue to improve the performance of MobileNetV3 model, the dilated convolution convolution with expansion rate of 2 and 4 was introduced into convolution layer, 1×1 full connection layer after deep convolution of 5×5 was connected to form a perceptron structure in convolution layer, and GLU gating mechanism activation function was used to train the best tomato disease recognition model. The average test recognition accuracy was as high as 98.25%, the data scale of the model was 43.57 MB, and the average detection time of a single tomato disease image was only 0.27s, after ten fold cross validation, the recognition accuracy of the model was 98.25%, and the test results were stable and reliable. The experiment showed that this study could significantly improve the detection efficiency of tomato diseases and reduce the time cost of disease image detection.

  • Topic--Agricultural Artificial Intelligence and Big Data
    HAN Shuqing, ZHANG Jing, CHENG Guodong, PENG Yingqi, ZHANG Jianhua, WU Jianzhai
    Smart Agriculture. 2020, 2(3): 21-36. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2020.2.3.202006-SA003

    Lameness in dairy cattle could cause significant economic losses to the dairy industry. Detection of lameness in a timely manner is critical to the high-quality development of dairy industry. The traditional method is visual locomotion scoring by dairy farmers, which is low efficiency, high cost and subjective. The demand for automated lameness detection is increasing. The review was conducted to find out the current state and challenges of automatic lameness detection technology development and to learn from the latest findings. The current automatic lameness detection systems were reviewed in this paper mainly rely on five technologies or combinations thereof, including machine vision, pressure distribution measuring system, wearable sensor system, behavior analysis and classification; the principle, function and features of these technologies were analyzed. Machine vision technique is to extract feature variables (e.g. back arch, head bob, abduction, stride length, walking speed, temperature, etc.) from video recordings of cattle movement by image processing. Pressure distribution measuring system contains an array of load cells to sense gait variables, when dairy cattle are walking by. By using accelerometer with high frequency data collection, the gait cycle parameters can be extracted and used for lameness detection. By using wearable devices, the number of lying/standing bouts and their duration, the total time spent lying, standing and ruminating per day can be recorded for individual cattle. The lameness can also be detected by behavior analysis. Currently, most of these studies were in the stage of sensor development or validation of algorithm. A few studies were in the stage of validation of performance and decision support with early warning system. The challenges to apply automatic lameness detection system in dairy farm includes the difficulties of acquiring high quality data of lameness features, lack of techniques to detect early lameness, identification errors caused by individual gait differences among dairy cattle, difficulties to function well in unstructured environment and difficulties to evaluate the benefits. To accelerate the development of automatic lameness detection systems, recommendations are proposed as follows: ①promoting lameness data sharing and data exchange among dairy farms; ②developing individual-based lameness classification model; ③developing multifunctional smart station which can detect lameness, measure body condition score, weighing, etc; ④evaluating the significance of automatic lameness detection to the dairy industry from the perspective of animal welfare, environment and food safety.

  • Topic--Smart Animal Husbandry Key Technologies and Equipment
    XIONG Benhai, ZHAO Yiguang, LUO Qingyao, ZHENG Shanshan, GAO Huajie
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(2): 110-120. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202205003

    The shortage of feed grain is continually worsening in China, which leads to the transformation of feed grain security into national food security. Therefore, comprehensively integrating the basic data resources of feed nutrition and improving the nutritional value of all available feed resources will be one of the key technical strategies to ensure national food security in China. In this study, based on the description specification and attribute data standard of 16 categories of Chinese feed raw materials, more than 500,000 pieces of data on the types, spatial distribution, chemical composition and nutritional value characteristics of existing feed resources, which were accumulated through previous projects from the sixth Five-Year Plan to the thirteenth Five-Year Plan period, were digitally collected, recorded, categorized and comprehensively analyzed. By using MySQL relational database technology and PHP program, a new generation of feed nutrition big data online platform (http://www.chinafeeddata.org.cn/) was developed and web data sharing service was provided as well. First of all, the online platform provided visual analysis of all warehousing data, which could realize the visual comparison of a single or multiple feed nutrients in various graphic forms such as scatter diagram, histogram, curve line and column chart. By using two-dimensional code technology, all feed nutrition attribute data and feed entity sample traceability data could be shared and downloaded remotely in real-time on mobile phones. Secondly, the online platform also incorporated various regression models for prediction of feed effective nutrient values using readily available feed chemical composition in the datasets, providing dynamic analysis for feed raw material nutrient variation. Finally, based on Geographic Information System technology, the online platform integrated the data of feed chemical composition and major mineral element concentrations with their geographical location information, which was able to provide the distribution query and comparative analysis of the geographic information map of the feed raw material nutrition data at both provincial and national level. Meanwhile, the online platform can also provide a download service of the various datasets, which brought convenience to the comprehensive application of existing feed nutrition data. This research also showed that expanding feed resource data and providing prediction and analysis models of feed effective nutrients could maximize the utilization of the existing feed nutrition data. After embedding online calculation modules of various feed formulation software, this platform would be able to provide a one-stop service and optimize the utilization of the feed nutrition data.

  • Overview Article
    GAO Zhen, ZHAO Chunjiang, YANG Guiyan, DONG Daming
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(2): 121-134. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202201013

    Raman spectroscopy is a type of scattering spectroscopy with features such as rapid, less susceptible to moisture interference, no sample pre-treatment and in vivo detection. As a powerful characterization tool for analyzing and testing the molecular composition and structure of substances, Raman spectroscopy is also playing an extremely important role in the detection of plant and animal phenotypes, food safety, soil and water quality in the agricultural field with the continuous improvement of Raman spectroscopy technology. In this paper, the detection principles of Raman spectroscopy are introduced, and the new progresses of eight Raman spectroscopy technology are summarized, including confocal microscopy Raman spectroscopy, Fourier transform Raman spectroscopy, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, resonance Raman spectroscopy, spatially shifted Raman spectroscopy, frequency-shifted excitation Raman difference spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy based on nonlinear optics, etc. And their advantages and disadvantages and application scenarios are prerented, respectively. The applications of Raman spectroscopy in plant detection, soil detection, water quality detection, food detection, etc. are summarized. It can be specifically subdivided into plant phenotype, plant stress, soil pesticide residue detection, soil colony detection, soil nutrient detection, food pesticide detection, food quality detection, food adulteration detection, and water quality detection. In future agricultural applications, the elimination of fluorescence background due to complex living organisms in Raman spectroscopy is the next research direction. The study of stable enhanced substrates is an important direction in the application of Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS). In order to meet the measurement of different scenarios, portable and telemetric Raman spectrometers will also play an important role in the future. Raman spectroscopy needs to be further explored for a wide variety of research objects in agriculture, especially for applications in animal science, for which there is still a paucity of relevant studies up to now. In the existing field of agricultural research, it is necessary to pursue the characterization of more specific substances by Raman spectroscopy, which can prompt the application of Raman spectroscopy for a wider range of uses in agriculture. Further, the pursuit of lower detection limits and higher stability for practical applications is also the direction of development of Raman spectroscopy in the field of agriculture. Finally, the challenges that need to be solved and the future development directions of Raman spectroscopy are proposed in the field of agriculture in order to bring more inspiration to future agricultural production and research.

  • Intelligent Management and Control
    ZHUANG Jiayu, XU Shiwei, LI Yang, XIONG Lu, LIU Kebao, ZHONG Zhiping
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(2): 174-182. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202203013

    To further improve the simulation and estimation accuracy of the supply and demand process of agricultural products, a large number of agricultural data at the national and provincial levels since 1980 were used as the basic research sample, including production, planted area, food consumption, industrial consumption, feed consumption, seed consumption, import, export, price, GDP, population, urban population, rural population, weather and so on, by fully considering the impact factors of agricultural products such as varieties, time, income and economic development, a multi-agricultural products supply and demand forecasting model based on long short-term memory neural network (LSTM) was constructed in this study. The general thought of supply and demand forecasting model is packaging deep neural network training model as an I/O-opening modular model, reserving control interface for input of outside data, and realizing the indicators forecasting of supply and demand and matrixing of balance sheet. The input of model included forecasting balance sheet data of agricultural products, annual price data, general economic data, and international currency data since 2000. The output of model was balance sheet data of next decade since forecasting time. Under the premise of fully considering the mechanical constraints, the model used the advantages of deep learning algorithms in nonlinear model analysis and prediction to analyze and predict supply and demand of 9 main types of agricultural products, including rice, wheat, corn, soybean, pork, poultry, beef, mutton, and aquatic products. The production forecast results of 2019-2021 based on this model were compared and verified with the data published by the National Bureau of Statistics, and the mean absolute percentage error was 3.02%, which meant the average forecast accuracy rate of 2019-2021 was 96.98%. The average forecast accuracy rate was 96.10% in 2019, 98.26% in 2020, and 96.58% in 2021, which shows that with the increase of sample size, the prediction effect of intelligent learning model would gradually get better. The forecasting results indicate that the multi-agricultural supply and demand prediction model based on LSTM constructed in this study can effectively reflect the impact of changes in hidden indicators on the prediction results, avoiding the uncontrollable error introduced by manual experience intervention. The model can provide data production and technical support such as market warning, policy evaluation, resource management and public opinion analysis for agricultural production and management and macroeconomic regulation, and can provide intelligent technical support for multi-regional and inter-temporal agricultural outlook work by monitoring agricultural operation data in a timely manner.

  • Topic--Agricultural Sensor and Internet of Things
    YANG XuanJiang, LI Hualong​, LI Miao​, HU Zelin​, LIAO Jianjun​, LIU Xianwang​, GUO Panpan​, YUE Xudong​
    Smart Agriculture. 2020, 2(2): 115-125. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2020.2.2.202004-SA001

    With the development of information technology, using big data analysis, monitoring of Internet of Things, sensor perception, wireless communication and other technologies to build a real-time online monitoring system for beehive is a feasible solution for reducing the stress response of bee colony caused by check the beehive artificially. Focusing on situation that real-time monitoring in the closed environment of the beehive is difficult, the STM32F103VBT6 32-bit microcontroller, integrated with the temperature and humidity sensor, microphone, and laser beam sensor were used in this study to develop a low-power, continuous working online monitoring system for the multi-parameter information acquisition and monitoring of beehive key parameters. The system mainly includes core processing module, data acquisition module, data sending module and database server. The data collection module includes a temperature and humidity collection unit inside the beehive, a bee colony sound collection unit, a bee in and out nest number counting unit, etc., and transfers data by accessing the mobile communication network. The performance test results of system on-site deployment showed that the developed system could monitor the temperature and humidity in the beehive in real time, effectively distinguish the bees of entering and leaving the beehive, record the numbers of bees of entering and leaving the nest door, and the bee colony sounds that the automatically obtained were consistent with the standard sound distribution of bee colony. The results indicate that this system meets the design requirements, can accurately and reliably collect the beehive parameters data, and can be used as a data collection method for related research of bee colony.

  • Information Processing and Decision Making
    Zhu Yeping, Li Shijuan, Li Shuqin
    Smart Agriculture. 2019, 1(1): 53-66. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2019.1.1.201901-SA005

    According to the demand of digitized analysis and visualization representation of crop yield formation and variety adaptability analysis, aiming at improving the timeliness, coordination and sense of reality of crop simulation model, key technologies of crop growth process simulation model and morphological 3D visualization were studied in this research. The internet of things technology was applied to collect the field data. The multi-agent technology was used to study the co-simulation method and design crop model framework. Winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) was taken as an example to conducted filed test, the 3D morphology visualization system was developed and validated. Taking three wheat varieties, Hengguan35 (Hg35), Jimai22 (Jm22) and Heng4399 (H4399) as research objects, logistic equation was constructed to simulate the change of leaf length, maximum leaf width, leaf height and plant height. Parametric modeling method and 3D graphics library (OpenGL) were used to build wheat organ geometry model so as to draw wheat morphological structure model. The R2 values of leaf length, maximum leaf width, leaf height and plant height were between 0.772-0.999, indicating that the model has high fitting degree. F values (between 10.153-4359.236) of regression equation and Sig. values (under 0.05) show that the model has good significance. Taking wheat as example, this research combined wheat growth model and structure model effectively in order to realize the 3D morphology visualization of crop growth processes under different conditions, it will provide references for developing the crop simulation visualization system, the method and related technologies are suitable for other field crops such as corn and rice, etc.

  • Intelligent Management and Control
    Zhang Haifeng, Li Yang, Zhang Yu, Song Lijuan, Tang Lixin, Bi Hongwen
    Smart Agriculture. 2019, 1(3): 87-99. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2019.1.3.201906-SA002

    The greenhouse vegetable industry play an important strategic role in the adjustment of agricultural transformation mode and the reform of supply side in Heilongjiang Province. Facility horticulture in Heilongjiang Province develops rapidly in recent years, technical support is in great demand, but the experts' technology support for facility horticulture is far from enough. Experts' on-site guidance costs much time and money in the countryside, while the service efficiency is very low. To solve this urgent problem, the architecture of "greenhouse vegetable intelligent terminal system based on cloud service" and the key technologies of implementation (low-cost IoT, distributed real-time operating architecture, virtual expert service, neural network image recognition and mobile terminal service) were put forward. Based on expert services, supplemented by data mining technology, IoT devices were used as expert's remote perception means, smart phones as user terminals, cloud service for integrating knowledge, resources and Internet of Things data to provide vegetable experts and greenhouse vegetable users with high information acquisition, storage, analysis,decision-making capabilities and effective solutions. Experts could view vegetable production status in greenhouses remotely through the Internet, get image and growth environment data, then provide remote guidance to vegetable farmers through the system, expert knowledge would be stored, mined and reused by the system. The Internet of Things system could automatically send out early warning information by judging the air temperature, humidity, illumination intensity and soil moisture in greenhouse. The application of knowledge map and neural network technology would reduce the workload of experts and increase concurrent processing capability of services at the same time. At present, part of this research has been applied in different user groups such as agricultural research departments, enterprises, vegetable cooperatives and farmers in Heilongjiang Province. The system can provide experts with remote inquiry means of greenhouse vegetable production environment, and has the characteristics of simple deployment and low cost. It is suitable for various greenhouse vegetable scenarios, including fruit and edible fungi. In order to popularize this technology in greenhouse vegetable production in China, and achieve an efficient experts' technical support, this research also proposed technical solutions of a large-scale application scenario through cloud computing in future.

  • Topic--Agricultural Remote Sensing and Phenotyping Information Acquisition Analysis
    Wu Gang, Peng Yaoqi, Zhou Guangqi, Li Xiaolong, Zheng Yongjun, Yan Haijun
    Smart Agriculture. 2020, 2(1): 111-120. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2020.2.1.202001-SA001

    Excessive application of water and fertilizer not only causes resources serious waste of, but also causes serious environmental pollution. The implementation of precision irrigation and fertilization can effectively reduce nutrient loss and environmental pollution, save irrigation water and improve the utilization rate of water and fertilizer resources, which is one of the important ways to promote the sustainable development of agriculture. The use of the integrated water-fertilizer equipment can effectively improve the utilization rate of water-fertilizer resources, but it is necessary to know the nutritional status of crops and water-fertilizer demand before operation. To acquire the information by hand-held measuring instruments, there are some disadvantages, such as poor timeliness and high labor intensity. In response to the above problems, this study took the common corn crop as an example, used the DJI Phantom III drone to carry RedEdge-M multispectral camera to collect multispectral images of corn crops over the fields, and measured nitrogen and moisture content of corn plants by YLS-D series plant nutrition tester. Based on this information, the collected images were divided into 3 levels, each level contains 530 five channel images (2650 single channel images), including 480 five channel images (2400 single channel images) in the training set and 50 five channel images (250 single channel images) in the verification set, and a method of identifying the nutritional status of corn crops based on convolutional neural network was proposed. Based on the TensorFlow deep learning framework, ResNet18 convolution neural network model was constructed. By entering color image data and five-channel multispectral image data into the model, the nutritional status recognition model of corn plant suitable for color image and multispectral image was trained, and the experimental results showed that the trained model could be used to recognize the multispectral images of corn, and the nutritional status of corn, topdressing guidance and GPS information could be outputted, the correct rate of the recognition color image model in the verification set was 84.7%. The correct rate of identifying multispectral image model in the verification set was 90.5%, the average time of model training was 4.5h, and the average time of recognizing a five channel image is 3.56 seconds, which can detect the nutritional status of corn crops quickly and undamaged, and provides a theoretical and technical basis for the accuracy of the application of water fertilizer in intelligent agriculture.

  • Topic--Smart Animal Husbandry Key Technologies and Equipment
    KANG Xi, LIU Gang, CHU Mengyuan, LI Qian, WANG Yanchao
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(2): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202204005

    Realizing the construction of intelligent farming by using advanced information technology, thus improving the living welfare of dairy cows and the economic benefits of dairy farms has become an important goal and task in dairy farming research field. Computer vision technology has the advantages of non-contact, stress-free, low cost and high throughput, and has a broad application prospect in animal production. On the basis of describing the importance of computer vision technology in the development of intelligent farming industry, this paper introduced the cutting-edge technology of cow physiological parameters and disease diagnosis based on computer vision, including cow temperature monitoring, body size monitoring, weight measurement, mastitis detection and lameness detection. The introduction coverd the development process of these studies, the current mainstream techniques, and discussed the problems and challenges in the research and application of related technology, aiming at the problem that the current computer vision-based detection methods are susceptible to individual difference and environmental changes. Combined with the development status of farming industry, suggestions on how to improve the universality of computer vision technology in intelligent farming industry, how to improve the accuracy of monitoring cows' physiological parameters and disease diagnosis, and how to reduce the influence of environment on the system were put forward. Future research work should focus on research and developmentof algorithm, make full use of computer vision technology continuous detection and the advantage of large amount of data, to ensure the accuracy of the detection, and improve the function of the system integration and data utilization, expand the computer vision system function. Under the premise that does not affect the ability of the system, to improve the study on the number of function integration and system function and reduce equipment costs.

  • Intelligent Equipment and Systems
    Wang Jiaojiao, Xu Bo, Wang Congcong, Yang Guijun, Yang Zhong, Mei Xin, Yang Xiaodong
    Smart Agriculture. 2019, 1(4): 91-104. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2019.1.4.201910-SA002

    In view of the demand of small and medium-sized farms for rapid monitoring and accurate diagnosis of crop growth, the National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture (NERCITA) designed a crop growth monitoring device which named CropSense. It is a portable crop health analysis instrument based on dual-channel high-throughput spectral signals which derived from the incident and reflected light intensity of the crop canopy at red and near-infrared bands. This paper designed and implemented a data collecting and analyzing system for CropSense. It consisted of a mobile application for collecting data of CropSense and a server-side system for data and model management. The system implemented data collecting, processing, analyzing and management completely. The system calculated normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI) based on the two-channels spectral sampling data from CropSense which connected smart phone by Bluetooth, then generated crop growth parameters about nitrogen content, chlorophyll content and Leaf Area Index with the built-in spectral inversion model in the server. Meanwhile, it calculated vegetation coverage, density and color content by images captured from the camera of smart phone. When we finished the sampling program, it generated growth parameter thematic maps by Kriging interpolation based on all sampling data of the selected fields. Considering the target yield of the plot, it could provide expert advice visually. Users could get diagnostic information and professional guiding scheme of crop plots immediately after collecting data by touch a button. Now the device and system have been applied in some experimental farms of research institutes. This paper detailed application of the system in XiaoTangShan farm of NERCITA. Compared with the traditional corn flare period samples and fertilize schemes, users could avoid errors caused by manual recording. Besides, with the same corn yield, the fertilization amount has reduced 16.67% when using the generation of the variable fertilization scheme by this system. The result showed that the system could get the crop growth status efficiently and produced reasonable fertilization. The system collected and analyzed crop growth efficiently and conveniently. It is suitable for various farmers without expertise to obtain the information of the crop growth timely and can guide them to operate more effectively and economically in the field. The system saved data to web server through the Internet which improved the shortcoming of poor sharing in the traditional data exporting mode. This system is practical and promising, and it will be widely applied in the explosion of family farms in China.

  • Special Issue--Agricultural Robot and Smart Equipment
    WU Jianqiao, FAN Shengzhe, GONG Liang, YUAN Jin, ZHOU Qiang, LIU Chengliang
    Smart Agriculture. 2020, 2(4): 17-40. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2020.2.4.202011-SA004

    Vegetable and fruit harvesting is the most difficult production process to achieve mechanized operations. High-efficiency and low-loss picking is also a worldwide problem in the field of agricultural robot research and development, resulting in few production and application equipment currently on the market. In response to the demand for picking vegetables and fruits, to improve the time-consuming, labor-intensive, low-efficiency, and low-automation problems of manual picking, scholars have designed a series of automated picking equipment in the recent 30 years, which has promoted the development of agricultural robot technology. In the research and development of fresh vegetable and fruit picking equipment, firstly, the harvesting object and harvesting scene should be determined according to the growth position, shape and weight of the crop, the complexity of the scene, the degree of automation required, through complexity estimation, mechanical characteristics analysis, pose modeling and other methods clarify the design requirements of agricultural robots. Secondly, as the core executor of the entire picking action, the design of the end effector of the picking robot is particularly important. In this article, the structure of the end effector was classified, the design process and method of the end effectors were summarized, the common end effector driving methods and cutting methods were expounded, and the fruit collection mechanism was summarized. Furthermore, the overall control scheme of the picking robot, recognition and positioning method, adaptive control scheme of obstacle avoidance method, quality classification method, human-computer interaction and multi-machine cooperation scheme were summarized. Finally, in order to evaluate the performance of the picking robot overall, the indicators of average picking efficiency, long-term picking efficiency, harvest quality, picking maturity rate and missed picking rate were proposed. The overall development trend was pointed that picking robots would develop toward generalization of picking target scenes, diversified structures, full automation, intelligence, and clustering were put forward in the end.

  • Information Processing and Decision Making
    YE Wenshuai, KANG Xi, HE Zhijiang, LI Mengfei, LIU Gang
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(4): 144-155. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202210001

    Beef cattle in the farm are active, which leads the collection of posture of the beef cattle changeable, so it is difficult to automatically measure the body size of the beef cattle. Aiming at the above problems, an automatic measurement method for beef cattle's body size under multi-pose was proposed by analyzing the skeleton features of beef cattle head and the edge contour features of beef cattle images. Firstly, the consumer-grade depth camera Azure Kinect DK was used to collect the top-view depth video data directly above the beef cattle and the video data were divided into frames to obtain the original depth image. Secondly, the original depth image was processed by shadow interpolation, normalization, image segmentation and connected domain to remove the complex background and obtain the target image containing only beef cattle. Thirdly, the Zhang-Suen algorithm was used to extract the beef cattle skeleton of the target image, and calculated the intersection points and endpoints of the skeleton, so as to analyze the characteristics of the beef cattle head to determine the head removal point, and to remove the beef cattle head information from the image. Finally, the curvature curve of the beef cattle profile was obtained by the improved U-chord curvature method. The body measurement points were determined according to the curvature value and converted into three-dimensional spaces to calculate the body size parameters. In this paper, the postures of beef cattle, which were analyzed by a large amount of depth image data, were divided into left crooked, right crooked, correct posture, head down and head up, respectively. The test results showed that the head removal method proposed based on the skeleton in multiple postures hads head removel success rate higher than 92% in the five postures. Using the body measurement point extraction method based on the improved U-chord curvature proposed, the average absolute error of body length measurement was 2.73 cm, the average absolute error of body height measurement was 2.07 cm, and the average absolute error of belly width measurement was 1.47 cm. The method provides a better way to achieve the automatic measurement of beef cattle body size in multiple poses.

  • Special Issue--Agricultural Robot and Smart Equipment
    CHEN Xuegeng, WEN Haojun, ZHANG Weirong, PAN Fochu, ZHAO Yan
    Smart Agriculture. 2020, 2(4): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2020.2.4.202002-SA003

    Agricultural machinery and equipment are important foundations for transforming agricultural development methods and promoting sustainable agricultural development, as well as are the key areas and core supports for promoting agricultural modernization. In order to clarify the development ideas of agricultural machinery informatization and find the key development directions, and vigorously promote the development of agricultural machinery intelligentization, the development status of foreign agricultural machinery and sensing technology fusion were analyzed in this article, and five major development characteristics: 1) development towarding digitalization, automation and informationization, 2) applying sensing technology to the design and manufacturing of agricultural machinery equipment, 3) rapidly developing of animal husbandry machinery sensing technology, 4) focusing on resource conservation and environmental protection, and sensing technology promoting sustainable agricultural development, and 5) towarding intelligent control, automatic operation and driving comfort development were summarized. Among them, some advanced intelligent agricultural machinery were introduced, including the German Krone BiGX700 self-propelled silage harvester, an automatic weeding and fertilization robot developed by the Queensland University of Technology in Australia—Agbot II, and John Deere CP690 self-propelled baler Cotton machine, etc. After that, the new characteristics of the development of agricultural mechanization in China were summarize, and the viewpoint was pointed out that although the current development of agricultural mechanization in China had achieved remarkable results, there were still problems such as low intelligence and informatization of agricultural machinery, and insufficient fusion of agricultural machinery and informatization. Then the prospects for the development of China's agricultural machinery and sensing technology fusion were put forward, including 1) promoting the development of intelligent perception technology and navigation technology research, 2) promoting the intelligentization of agricultural machinery and equipment, and building an agricultural intelligent operation system, 3) promoting the research of agricultural machinery autonomous operation technology and the construction of unmanned farms, and 4) strengthening the technical standard formulation of agricultural machinery informatization and the training of compound talents. The fusion of agricultural machinery and sensing technology can realize the effective and diversified fusion of agricultural mechanization and sensing technology, maximize the guiding effect of informatization, improve the efficiency of agricultural production in China, and promote the development of digital agriculture and modern agriculture.

  • Overview Articles
    Zhao Yiguang, Yang Liang, Zheng Shanshan, Xiong Benhai
    Smart Agriculture. 2019, 1(1): 20-31. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.2019.1.1.201812-SA017

    Intelligent equipment for livestock production is one of the components of intelligent agricultural machinery equipment, and is the focus of technology development in international agricultural equipment industry. This paper reviewed the current situation and development trend of intelligent equipment for livestock production systems nationally and internationally, including electronic feeding stations, animal farming robots, and many supporting intelligent facilities within the animal house. The features and performance characteristics of the equipment were discussed. The development of intelligent equipment for livestock production systems mainly focused on pigs and dairy cows including electronic sow feeding station, lactating sow precision feeding system, electronic cattle feeding station, automatic cattle feeding system, cattle feed pusher and dairy cow milking robot. The development and application of intelligent livestock equipment such as the electronic feeding stations and feeding robots, have significantly increased the production efficiency and saved labor cost in both pig and dairy farms. In addition, it also contributed to improve both of the animal and farmer welfare. However, there is still considerable room to get the application of intelligent livestock equipment improved in practice. For example, the animals have to be trained to get used to the intelligent facilities. On the other hand, the intelligent facilities are also required to identify individual animal or animal organ more accurately in order to further increase the production efficiency. Therefore, the key features in the further development of intelligent livestock equipment would be smarter, more convenient, more reliable, and more economical. At the meantime, it should be a highly integrated and coordinated intelligent system including intelligent facilities, well trained staff, good animal welfare, and comfortable environment. Therefore, the industrial application of the intelligent livestock equipment should be integrated with the local farming practice and fitted with the layout of animal houses in order to increase the efficiency of the equipment, and consequently, to improve animal welfare. The systematical combination of intelligent facilities and animal physiology, animal growth, and animal behavior could contribute to the dynamic interactions between the equipment and animal. Finally, it was concluded that the development of intelligent equipment should be coordinated with the theory of animal production, the function of animal products and the innovation of farming practice. And it also should be continuously updated to promote the transformation and upgrading of animal husbandry industry.

  • Special Issue--Key Technologies and Equipment for Smart Orchard
    FENG Han, ZHANG Hao, WANG Zi, JIANG Shijie, LIU Weihong, ZHOU Linghui, WANG Yaxiong, KANG Feng, LIU Xingxing, ZHENG Yongjun
    Smart Agriculture. 2022, 4(3): 12-23. https://doi.org/10.12133/j.smartag.SA202207002

    To solve the problems of low level of digitalization of orchard management and relatively single construction method, a three-dimensional virtual orchard construction method based on laser point cloud was proposed in this research. First, the hand-held 3D point cloud acquistion equipment (3D-BOX) combined with the lidar odometry and mapping (SLAM-LOAM) algorithm was used to complete the acquisition of the point cloud data set of orchard; then the outliers and noise points of the point cloud data were removed by using the statistical filtering algorithm, which was based on the K-neighbor distance statistical method. To achieve this, a distance threshold model for removing noise points was established. When a discrete point exceeded, it would be marked as an outlier, and the point was separated from the point cloud dataset to achieve the effect of discrete point filtering. The VoxelGrid filter was used for down sampling, the cloth simulation filtering (CSF) cloth simulation algorithm was used to calculate the distance between the cloth grid points and the corresponding laser point cloud, and the distinction between ground points and non-ground points was achieved by dividing the distance threshold, and when combined with the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) clustering algorithm, ground removal and cluster segmentation of orchard were realized; finally, the Unity3D engine was used to build a virtual orchard roaming scene, and convert the real-time GPS data of the operating equipment from the WGS-84 coordinate system to the Gauss projection plane coordinate system through Gaussian projection forward calculation. The real-time trajectory of the equipment was displayed through the LineRenderer, which realized the visual display of the motion trajectory control and operation trajectory of the working machine. In order to verify the effectiveness of the virtual orchard construction method, the test of orchard construction method was carried out in the Begonia fruit and the mango orchard. The results showed that the proposed point cloud data processing method could achieve the accuracy of cluster segmentation of Begonia fruit trees and mango trees 95.3% and 98.2%, respectively. Compared with the row spacing and plant spacing of fruit trees in the actual mango orchard, the average inter-row error of the virtual mango orchard was about 3.5%, and the average inter-plant error was about 6.6%. And compared the virtual orchard constructed by Unity3D with the actual orchard, the proposed method can effectively reproduce the actual three-dimensional situation of the orchard, and obtain a better visualization effect, which provides a technical solution for the digital modeling and management of the orchard.

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