Computer vision and image processing for precision agriculture

Computer vision is the area through which machines "see". Instead of eyes, it uses cameras to locate, monitor, and quantify the targets for further image processing. In precision agriculture, this technique has been commonly used, playing a crucial role in agricultural automation. This chapter will discuss the numerous computer vision applications in agriculture, viz., detection, plant health monitoring, harvesting, sorting and grading, machine guidance, and field robotics. With high performance and high accuracy, computer vision can improve small-scale farming through agriculture automation to achieve low-cost advantages. The potential implementation of computer vision technology along with deep learning is also briefly addressed. The application of computer vision for agricultural production management based on large-scale datasets is more commonly used to solve agricultural field issues and further improve the agricultural automation system's economics and efficiency.