The numerous issues involved with crop management in today’s dynamic agricultural landscape demand the integration of advanced technologies. One of the main crops in the world, soybeans is subject to a variety of stresses that can have a big effect on crop productivity and health. Wilting is one of the most important signs of plant stress and physiological imbalance among them. The ability to accurately and promptly identify wilting in soybean leaves holds the key to implementing targeted interventions, optimizing resource usage and ultimately ensuring sustainable agricultural practices. However, because of water shortages, drought stress can have a significant impact on soybean yield
(Deshmukh et al., 2014). Drought stress lowers seed weight later in the process, but it also lowers the quantity of seed per soybean pod in the early stages of seed filling
(Desclaux et al., 2000). There is a pressing need to develop soybean cultivars with drought tolerance to sustain crop productivity under drought conditions
(Comas et al., 2013).
The core of this work is the application of state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, a branch of artificial intelligence that is distinguished by its capacity to learn on its own and recognize complex patterns in large datasets. Deep learning models, in contrast to standard methods, possess the ability to understand extensive relationships, which allows them to extract subtle features that are frequently undetectable to human observers. With its smart and sophisticated approach to wilting detection, this revolutionary technology has the potential to completely change the soybean production industry. Several methods have been proposed by researchers to reliably identify and categorize plant infections. Some rely on conventional image processing methods that combine manually executed extraction of features and segmentation
(Daniya et al., 2022; Dubey et al., 2012) suggested a K-means clustering technique to segment the leaf portion that is infected and a multi-class support vector machine, or SVM, is used for the final classification.
Convolution neural networks, or CNNs, have drawn a lot of interest lately because of their capacity to extract intricate low-level characteristics from pictures and perform identification and classification tasks. As a result, since CNNs produce better results, they are recommended to replace conventional techniques in automated plant disease detection
(Karthik et al., 2019). Barbedo, (2018) has suggested a CNN-based prediction model for paddy plant image processing and categorization. Additionally,
Vardhini et al., (2020) employed a CNN to identify diseases in rice fields. Convolutional neural networks with four to six layers are typically used by researchers to classify various plant species. Additionally,
Mohanty et al., (2016) classified, recognized and segmented many plant diseases using a CNN and a transfer learning technique. The datasets employed in these studies are not very diverse, despite the fact that many other types of study have been conducted with CNNs and improved results have been reported
(Panigrahi et al., 2020).
The development of a smart, deep learning-based system holds the potential to serve as a template for addressing similar challenges across diverse crops and agricultural contexts. The knowledge gained from this exploration not only contributes to soybean crop management but also paves the way for broader applications in the domain of smart agriculture. The convergence of agriculture and cutting-edge deep learning technologies in the pursuit of advancing soybean wilting classification signifies a pivotal moment in the evolution of modern farming practices. Through the utilization of artificial intelligence, this study aims to enhance crop health, empower farmers and make a positive impact on the sustainable and effective future of worldwide agriculture.
Related work
Improved crop management and reducing the negative effects of stressors on agricultural productivity are the main goals of the current wave of research inspired by the growing field of agriculture and artificial intelligence, especially deep learning. Breeders of soybeans have worked over the past 20 years to choose plants that exhibit the slow-wilting characteristic in drought-stressed environments by grading canopy wilting and ocular observations
(Carter et al., 2016; Kim and AlZubi, 2024). But in breeding programs requiring a lot of crossings and thousands of progenies to be screened, it is not possible to finish scoring canopy wilting on thousands of breeding progeny rows in a single day. Moreover, visual evaluations might be biased or prone to human mistakes, which could lower breeding programs’ ability to choose the best genotypes (
Bagherzadi, 2017). The aim of this study is to provide a comprehensive overview of the literature on the subject of smart detection with deep learning technologies for the progress of soybean wilting categorization. However, because to the high computational cost of training, deep CNN layers are challenging to implement. Several scholars have developed methods based on transfer learning to address these problems
(Tan et al., 2018; Andrew et al., 2019; Andrew-Onesimu and Karthikeyan 2020;
Mhathesh et al., 2021; Maria et al., 2022; Kusuma et al., 2022). Several well-liked models for transfer learning include Inception, DenseNet, ResNet and VGG-16
(Too et al., 2019; Min, et al., 2024). Multiple class data from the ImageNet dataset is used to train these models. Since the picture features such as edges and contours are shared by all datasets, these models may be trained on any kind of dataset. Therefore, the most appropriate and reliable model for picture classification has been determined to be the transfer learning strategy
(Hussain et al., 2018). A CNN was proposed by
Jadhav et al., (2021) to identify plant diseases. With this method, diseases in soybean plants were identified using CNN models that had already been trained. Better results were obtained when pre-trained transfer learning techniques, including AlexNet and GoogleNet, were used in the tests; nonetheless, the model lagged behind in terms of classifying diversity. In their study,
Abbas et al., (2021) suggested using the conditional generative adversarial networks to create a library of artificial photos of tomato plant leaves. Real-time data capture and collecting, which were previously costly, time-consuming and arduous, may now be accomplished with the help of generative networks.
Anh et al., (2021) discovered that a previously trained MobileNet CNN model could effectively perform multi-leaf classification on a benchmark dataset, achieving a dependable accuracy of 96.58%. Furthermore, the authors of
(Kabir et al., 2021) assert that their study is the first to use a multi-label CNN to classify 28 different classes of plant diseases. The multi-label CNN was proposed for determining the classification of multiple diseases of plants using transfer learning approaches, including DenseNet, Inception, Xception, ResNet, VGG and MobileNet.
With the world population growing and environmental changes occurring quickly, crops are becoming increasingly important to guarantee people and animals’ long-term health and welfare by providing sufficient and wholesome food supplies. Varieties of soybean that are resistant to drought are especially vulnerable to the negative impacts of weather and water stress, which results in significant physiological changes in the plants. This study aims to identify and evaluate the water stress levels in soybean crops, which is an important task. The study offers a contemporary and practical substitute for conventional manual surveillance techniques by combining a mechanized strategy with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to increase efficiency and decrease time requirements. This approach promises to provide timely and accurate insights into the water stress levels of soybean crops, supporting more accurate and proactive agricultural management practices.