Search

Going beyond previous work, this paper presents a systematic literature review that explores the deployment of satellites, drones, and ground-based sensors for yield prediction in agriculture. It covers multiple aspects of the topic, including crop types, key sensor platforms, data analysis techniques, and performance in estimating yield. To this end, datasets from Scopus and Web of Science were analyzed, resulting in the full review of 269 out of 1429 retrieved publications. Our study revealed that China (93 articles, >1800 citations) and the USA (58 articles, >1600 citations) are prominent contributors in this field; while satellites were the primary remote sensing platform (62%), followed by airborne (30%) and proximal sensors (27%). Additionally, statistical methods were used in 157 articles, and model-based approaches were utilized in 60 articles, while machine learning and deep learning were employed in 142 articles and 62 articles, respectively. When comparing methods, machine learning and deep learning methods exhibited high accuracy in crop yield prediction, while other techniques also demonstrated success, contingent on the specific crop platform and method employed. The findings of this study serve as a comprehensive roadmap for researchers and farmers, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and optimize agricultural practices, paving the way towards a fully digitized yield prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cotton constitutes a significant commercial crop and a widely traded commodity around the world. The accurate prediction of its yield quantity could lead to high economic benefits for farmers as well as for the rural national economy. In this research, we propose a multiple-input neural network model for the prediction of cotton's production. The proposed model utilizes as inputs three different kinds of data (soil data, cultivation management data, and yield management data) which are treated and handled independently. The significant advantages of the selected architecture are that it is able to efficiently exploit mixed data, which usually requires being processed separately, reduces overfitting, and provides more flexibility and adaptivity for low computational cost compared to a classical fully-connected neural network. An empirical study was performed utilizing data from three consecutive years from cotton farms in Central Greece (Thessaly) in which the prediction performance of the proposed model was evaluated against that of traditional neural network-based and state-of-the-art models. The numerical experiments revealed the superiority of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]