Crop

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7 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

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Period ending 2026-09-21

5 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Crop.

21 papers

Latest in Crop

Sep 16, 2026cs.CV

MCLC-NET: Multimodal Continual Learning for Leaf Counting

Leaf counting is an important task in plant phenotyping for monitoring plant growth and estimating crop yield. Most existing methods rely on RGB images, but their performance is often affected by occlusion, lighting variations, and other real-world challenges. Additional modalities, such as depth and thermal images, can provide useful complementary information. However, multimodal leaf counting remains underexplored. Also, many existing methods assume that all training data are available simultaneously, which is impractical in real agricultural settings, where data is collected over time from multiple sources. To address these challenges, we propose MCLC-NET, a multimodal continual learning framework for leaf counting. It learns tasks sequentially using a memory-based strategy with a memory buffer to retain important samples from previous tasks. We also introduce MMLC, a real-world multimodal leaf-counting dataset designed for a domain incremental scenario (DIS) in CL. It contains RGB, depth, and thermal images collected across different crop types under varying environmental conditions, arranged in three orderings: crop-wise, time-wise, and mixed. Experimental results, averaged over three random seeds, demonstrate that MCLC-NET consistently outperforms existing methods across all three task orderings, achieving the lowest AMSE of 0.675±\pm0.027, 0.542±\pm0.069, and 0.745±\pm0.057, respectively.
Ruchi Bhatt, Pratibha Kumari, Shreya Bansal +3
Sep 15, 2026cs.RO

SPROUT: The Open-Source Soft Growing Robot for Search and Rescue

Soft robotic systems have long been theorized as ideal candidates for use in search and rescue operations; however, there have been significant barriers to entry in graduating soft robotic systems from the laboratory to the field. To address this gap in replicable, reliable soft robot systems, we present the designs for SPROUT, the Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit. The system has matured over years of interaction with professional urban search and rescue communities, with the goal of operating in dusty, wet, and isolated conditions. This manuscript contains supplementary material, including code, parts manifests, CAD assemblies, and build instructions to allow the broader robotics research community to build their own SPROUT systems. The modular hardware and ROS 2-based software stack support task-specific payloads and control functions, allowing SPROUT to be adapted for applications beyond search and rescue, including infrastructure inspection and archaeology. Here, we demonstrate SPROUT performing a variety of challenging inspection and traversal tasks in collapsed structure training sites used by first responders. The main project page is available online at https://sprout-mitll.github.io/sprout/.
Antonio Alvarez Valdivia, Ciera McFarland, Robert Reeve +5
Sep 15, 2026cs.CV

Evaluating Mesh Reconstruction Methods for Crop Phenotyping

Phenotyping an agricultural crop is crucial for studying its entire life cycle, as it provides vital insights to improve yield and, ultimately, food production. Doing the same for crops grown on remote sites is a challenge for the specialists who cannot be available on-site. 3D reconstruction techniques offer a promising solution to this problem by enabling crop digitization, allowing specialists to access the resulting 3D crop models from anywhere at any time. In this work, we evaluate recent 3D reconstruction pipelines for crop phenotyping. We focus on 7 mesh reconstruction pipelines and measure the fidelity and consistency of their outputs qualitatively and quantitatively. Our results suggest that the meshes produced by the GGGS, PGSR, and 2DGS are preferable to the other pipelines, owing to their quantitative metrics and visually pleasing outputs. The GGGS pipeline is better than the second-best pipeline (2DGS) by about 27% on the radar chart with 5 dimensions, namely, User ratings, Chamfer distance, LPIPS, PSNR, and SSIM.
Karanvir Singh, Theo Morales, Binh-Son Hua +1
Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

EgoMaize: A First-Person Maize Instance Segmentation Benchmark under Severe Field Occlusion

Close-range first-person field images are important for mobile maize phenotyping because many plant-level traits depend on in-canopy structures that are difficult to ob serve from overhead views. However, post-seedling maize fields create a difficult in stance segmentation setting: stems, leaves, tassels, and neighboring plants are elon gated, repetitive, and strongly occluded. We introduce EgoMaize, a compact benchmark for first-person maize instance segmentation, where the task is to predict ownership consistent plant masks and plant-owned stem/tassel cues from close-range field images with severe same-class overlap. Existing visible-only labels can fragment one physi cal plant into disconnected supervision, while full-amodal labels may require unverifi able completion behind neighboring plants or field objects. EgoMaize therefore uses an evidence-closed annotation workflow for occluded maize regions and assigns unreli able maize regions to ignore rather than background. Baseline results show that pre trained query-based grouping, boundary refinement, and high-resolution crop refine ment help different aspects of the task, but no architecture solves the coupled chal lenges of fine structure recovery, same-class instance ownership, and occlusion reason ing; occlusion-level analysis further shows that performance decreases as plant visi bility becomes more limited. The dataset and code are publicly available at https: //github.com/JaaaaaaaD/EgoMaize.
Jiayi Li, Zihan Zhang, Erhankang Yan +4
Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

When Ground-Truth Fidelity Matters: An Orchestrated UAS Framework for Wheat Streak Mosaic Virus Detection Using Vision Transformers and Machine Learning

Wheat streak mosaic virus (WSMV) is a destructive pathogen of sweet corn and other cereal crops, causing yield losses and complicating early detection because symptoms are spatially variable and subtle. In sweet corn seed production, WSMV also has regulatory importance, as phytosanitary regulations from countries such as New Zealand and Chile require seed lots to be certified virus-free. Visual scouting is unreliable because symptoms can resemble abiotic stress, while enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is accurate but expensive, labor-intensive, and difficult to scale. We present an automated pipeline for plant-level WSMV detection using unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) multispectral imagery. The framework integrates orthomosaic reconstruction, geospatial alignment, plant extraction, and classification using a Vision Transformer with seven-channel inputs (five spectral bands, NDVI, and NDRE). Using treatment-based labels, the model achieved 89% accuracy on over 6,500 test patches across multiple growth stages. However, ELISA-based ground truth revealed substantial label noise: only a small fraction of sampled plants in inoculated plots were infected. Treatment labels therefore did not reliably represent infection status, and the high accuracy was largely driven by label bias rather than disease detection. Performance decreased markedly against row-level symptom severity and plant-level ELISA labels. Under these higher-fidelity but smaller-sample conditions, both deep learning and classical machine learning showed limited generalization and weak separability between ELISA-confirmed mock-inoculated and infected plants. These results show that UAS-based disease detection is constrained by label fidelity and data availability, emphasizing biologically grounded labels and models aligned with real-world conditions.
Dewi Endah Kharismawati, Sandeep Dhakal, Courtney E. McCusker +3
Sep 1, 2026cs.CV

Automated Maize Ear Phenotyping Using 3D Reconstructions

Maize kernel traits such as row number, kernels per row, and kernel size vary largely for genetic reasons and are consistently associated with regions of the genome that influence yield. Manual measurement of these traits, however, cannot keep pace with the volume of maize generated in a breeding program. To address this, we developed and validated a fully automated pipeline for extracting these traits from 3D point clouds of corn ears, built on a recently developed video-to-point-cloud platform. Raw video frames are processed through COLMAP and NeRF, the ear is isolated via density-based separation, and the point cloud is distance-calibrated to physical units. The calibrated ear point cloud was Z-axis aligned via PCA and cylindrically unwrapped to a 2D image. We enhanced contrast and performed zero-fine-tuning instance segmentation using Cellpose-SAM. A triple-juxtaposed unwrap strategy was used to prevent double-counting at the seam. The pipeline achieved kernel count R^2 = 0.921 (MAPE = 10.33%) and kernel row number within +-2 rows for 95.2% of ears (MAE = 0.75 rows) on a 168-ear held-out set from the 268-ear labeled dataset. The resulting multi-trait dataset has known genotype identity for each ear, positioning it for phenotype-to-genotype association analyses.
Ritwesh A. Kumar, Som Tripathi, Peja Matthews +5
Aug 31, 2026cs.CV

AI-enabled Low-Cost 3D Maize Ear Morphometry Platform at Breeding Scale

Maize ear geometry (length, width, curvature, and volume) is closely tied to yield and grain-filling outcomes, but existing high-throughput phenotyping pipelines remain constrained by the cost, labor, and specialized hardware they require. We developed and validated a low-cost pipeline that reconstructs a watertight 3-D mesh of a maize ear from a single 20-second video captured with a consumer-grade DSLR on a motorized turntable under uniform LED illumination. Camera poses from a multi-seed COLMAP procedure initialize a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), and a cylindrical holder of known diameter, visible in every frame, provides automatic metric scaling with downstream geometric quality control. Applied to 300 ears spanning a diverse maize inbred panel, 250 (83.3%) passed automated processing and quality control. Skeleton length agreed with manual caliper measurements across all 250 ears (R^2 = 0.964, RMSE = 4.68 mm), and convex-hull volume agreed with water-displacement volume on a 15-ear subset spanning the full size range (R^2 = 0.982, RMSE = 5.26 mL). Residual length error grew with ear curvature, whereas bounding-box height, which records the same straight-line chord as calipers, showed no such trend; the discrepancy therefore originates in the measurement definition, since calipers record the chord while skeleton length traces the geodesic arc. The capture hardware costs approximately 607 USD, and operator involvement fell from roughly five minutes to one minute per ear, with all downstream processing running unattended. The platform provides a foundation for breeding-scale 3-D ear phenotyping.
Therin Young, Elijah Rodriguez, Lisa Coffey +4
Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

AlbumentationsX: One Augmentation Pipeline for Images and Related Annotations

Augmentation can corrupt a training example when an image and its annotations receive different random changes. A crop must use the same coordinates for the image, mask, boxes, keypoints, stereo views, video frames, or volume. Code paths that choose these values separately can silently misalign the data. AlbumentationsX keeps the transform list, probabilities, annotation settings, and random seed in one Compose object. Each call chooses random values once and applies them to every supported part of the training example. The library keeps each object's mask, box, and label together and lets projects add their own transforms. It can also save the pipeline definition, show what happened in one call, and run that call again. The examples place Compose after files have been decoded into arrays and before PyTorch groups examples into a batch. AlbumentationsX executes the declared transforms. Practitioners still decide whether a flip, crop, color change, or other operation preserves the correct label for their task.
Vladimir Iglovikov
Aug 10, 2026cs.CV

One-Time Training for All Grains: Open-Set Grain Recognition and Quantitative Analysis

Advances in crop breeding have introduced an increasing number of grain varieties, creating a growing demand for efficient variety recognition and quantitative analysis. However, existing methods are typically trained on a fixed variety set, and incorporating newly introduced varieties requires additional data collection and model retraining. To address this limitation, we propose GROW, a framework for Grain Recognition and quantitative analysis in Open sets Without retraining. GROW first performs class-agnostic grain localization, converting mixed-grain images into individual instances for variety-wise counting and phenotypic measurement. It then combines visual embeddings and morphological descriptors into fused grain descriptors stored in an extensible GrainBank. Query grains are recognized through rank-similarity weighted top-k retrieval, and newly introduced varieties are incorporated by appending their descriptors without updating the deployed models. Extensive experiments under progressive variety expansion, varying grain densities, and background domain shifts demonstrate the scalability, robustness, and adaptability of GROW. Compared with joint retraining, GROW reduced the average category-registration time from 4153 s to only 39 s while maintaining competitive recognition performance. These results demonstrate that GROW provides an efficient and maintainable solution for extensible grain recognition, counting, and phenotypic analysis without repeated model retraining.
Qihe Su, Mengyu Sun, Yuxi Ke +4
Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

Global Attention-Fused Image Cropping with Attention-Guided and Global-Aligned Crop Evaluator

Image cropping aims to improve image aesthetics by preserving important content within an appropriately composed region. However, most existing methods focus primarily on salient regions and therefore have limited sensitivity to the global relationships among the main image components. To address this limitation, we propose Global Attention-Fused Image Cropping (GAFIC), which consists of an Attention-Guided Feature Fusion (AGFF) and a Global-Aligned Crop Evaluator (GACE). AGFF aggregates the importance of local regions to construct a global representation that captures both image structure and local details. GACE aligns candidate crop features with this global representation, enabling crop evaluation to remain sensitive to boundary changes. We further combine three ranking losses across multiple scales to obtain accurate and stable crop scores. Extensive experiments on the GAIC and CPC datasets demonstrate that GAFIC outperforms existing image-cropping methods, particularly in terms of accuracy and stability. Unlike pixel-level retargeting methods such as seam carving, inpainting, and diffusion-based synthesis, GAFIC does not synthesize or modify the retained pixels; instead, it selects an aesthetically preferred crop from the source image, making it suitable for scenarios where pixel integrity and efficient batch processing are important. The source code is available at https://github.com/AIVRC/GAFIC.git.
Haotian Yang, Zhile Yang, Kin-Man Lam +2
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

UAV3DCrop: Benchmarking 3D Reconstruction in Repeated Multi-Angle UAV Crop Surveys

Accurate 3D crop monitoring underpins data-driven precision agriculture by enabling field-scale analysis of plant structure, growth dynamics, and management response. Modern 3D reconstruction methods perform strongly on generic benchmarks, but rendered appearance may not translate into metrically and agronomically useful geometry in crop fields. We introduce UAV3DCrop, a public benchmark of repeated multi-angle unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) crop surveys. It contains 88,830 RGB images at 5280×39565280 \times 3956 pixels, with a ground sampling distance of 3.6-5.8 mm, from 91 scenes spanning corn, soybean, wheat, and oat. Track A evaluates seven scene-optimized methods -- Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) variants -- on held-out views, photogrammetry-referenced depth, and canopy-height recovery. Track B tests four pretrained feed-forward models on zero-shot camera-pose and geometry estimation. The scene-optimized methods rank differently across the three targets: Splatfacto-big leads appearance, whereas Scaffold-GS leads depth and is statistically tied with Splatfacto for canopy height. Among feed-forward models, MapAnything leads on seven of the eight metrics, while the remaining models vary more across crops and fail severely on absolute scale in a way that alignment conceals. Repeated acquisitions reveal further sensitivities that differ by output type and by model, associated with position within the acquisition sequence and with tie-point multiplicity. Current 3D reconstruction methods are therefore not yet interchangeable for agronomic use: no single method wins on appearance, geometry, and canopy height at once, and only one of four feed-forward models recovers usable metric scale. The dataset is publicly available at https://link-dev.github.io/UAV3DCrop/
Junxiong Zhou, Xuechen Li, Chonghao Qiu +11
Jul 27, 2026cs.CV

Embeddings based Anomaly Detection for Cleaning Global Crop Type Reference Datasets

High quality reference data remain a critical bottleneck for crop-type mapping at any spatial and temporal scale. Operational systems such as WorldCereal aggregate labels from heterogeneous sources such as parcel registers, national databases, field surveys, and map-derived products, each with their own biases, coverage gaps and unknown label noise. Simple global rules are inadequate, since crop phenology and observation conditions vary strongly across regions and seasons. In this study, we focus on a single, operationally relevant question: whether embeddings produced through geospatial foundation models are a viable basis for cleaning the reference data. We propose a practical, locality-aware, embedding-based anomaly (EBA) detection framework that operates on the embeddings of a pretrained Earth-observation encoder. We score each labelled sample against other samples of the same crop in the same area using a pretrained embedding, flag the ones that stand out, and test whether removing or down-weighting them before training yields a better model. We establish that the flagged points are genuinely mislabelled or misplaced in two independent ways: against synthetic ground truth, the detector concentrates injected label errors 2.5-5x above chance in its flagged set (detection AUROC up to 0.84); and on real data, a model-independent test shows that removing or confidence-weighting the flagged held-out points raises measured accuracy in trained models, for both crop type and land cover. Acting on the flags then improves the WorldCereal crop-type model across five macro-regions, evaluated on a fixed held-out split under three views. We find conservative cleaning helps while over-cleaning hurts. The EBA detector approach is designed to be reproducible and extensible, and can serve as a template for cleaning large, noisy Earth observation reference datasets beyond crop mapping.
Syed Roshaan Ali Shah, Kristof Van Tricht, Christina Butsko +2
Jul 16, 2026cs.CV

Cotton-SF YOLO: Learning Structural and Frequency Cues for Early Cotton Square Detection in Complex Field Environments

Cotton squares are important phenotypic indicators of the early reproductive growth of cotton, and automatic field detection of cotton squares provides an important basis for cotton growth monitoring and precision cultivation management. However, early cotton square detection in complex field environments remains insufficiently explored, as cotton squares are small, frequently occluded, easily blurred, subject to illumination variations, and exhibit low contrast against surrounding cotton leaves. To address these challenges, we propose a task-oriented framework based on YOLO26m, named Cotton-SF YOLO, for cotton square detection under natural field conditions. To improve the perception of small and irregular cotton square boundaries, we introduce Dynamic Snake Convolution into the detector, enabling adaptive extraction of deformable edge features. Furthermore, a frequency-domain feature modulation module is designed by incorporating spectral enhancement into the C2f structure, which recalibrate frequency-domain representations and strengthen discriminative edge and texture cues while reducing interference from complex cotton leaf backgrounds. Trained and evaluated on our newly constructed and annotated field dataset with manually annotated cotton squares, the proposed model achieves mAP50_{50}, mAP50:95_{50:95}, and recall values of 0.8196, 0.4942, and 0.7939, improving over the baseline YOLO26m by 1.25%, 3.45%, and 2.96%, respectively. Ablation experiments and visualization demonstrate that the best performance is achieved with the complementary effects of structural and frequency cues.
Chengjia Zhang, Yu Li, Feiri Ali +5
Jul 3, 2026cs.CV

GrowFields: Compositional 4D Neural Fields for Topology-Changing Plant Growth

Quantifying plant growth dynamics from sparse longitudinal 3D observations is fundamental for agriculture and plant sciences. Yet, plants pose unique challenges: they undergo intricate non-rigid deformations, exhibit changing topology as new organs emerge, and often lack explicit temporal correspondences between consecutive data acquisitions due to newly formed tissue. Methods designed for general scenes struggle to model topology changes and asynchronous organ growth characteristic of plants. To address these challenges, we introduce GrowFields, a compositional dynamic neural field representation for organ-aware 4D plant growth modelling from point cloud time series. Our approach decomposes a plant into its constituent organs and aligns each organ into its own canonical coordinate frame, isolating intrinsic growth patterns from global plant motion. We then learn a shared continuous neural deformation field that models temporal dynamics across all organs, conditioned on learnable per-organ latent codes capturing organ identity and growth characteristics. The resulting modular yet unified representation naturally accommodates the asynchronous development of plant organs while remaining grounded in the practical setting of organ-level plant tracking. We evaluate GrowFields on growth sequences from four plant species, assessing geometric fitting and organ tracking accuracy using manually annotated leaf-tip trajectories. Results demonstrate consistent improvements in spatial precision, temporal coherence, and morphological fidelity over a range of existing representations.
Joaquin Gajardo, Michele Volpi, Marko Mihajlovic +3
Jun 28, 2026cs.LG

When Prices Double in a Week: Forecasting of Agricultural Volatility in Import-Isolated Markets

Vegetable prices in Sri Lanka are highly volatile because the market is largely import-isolated, so supply disruptions quickly drive prices up. This study develops a machine learning framework to forecast such volatility by incorporating supply-chain-aware features and explicitly modelling the country's two cultivation seasons, Maha (October-April) and Yala (May-September). An integrated dataset was constructed by combining retail and farmer-gate prices with origin-aligned weather variables, diesel costs, and exchange rates across 12 vegetable varieties and 14 market centres from 2013 to 2019. A gradient-boosted ensemble model (XGBoost and LightGBM) was trained and optimised using Optuna, and unified and season-specific configurations were compared. Results show that season-specific models improve within-season fit, with the Yala-specific model achieving the highest R2 of 0.9420 (95% CI [0.690, 1.000]), while the unified model delivers the best overall predictive accuracy of 90.84% (95% CI [88.34%, 91.52%]) and an R2 of 0.9281 (95% CI [0.760, 1.000]). Notably, the unified model maintains 85.96% accuracy on a completely unseen 2024 hyperinflationary period without retraining, successfully tracking major price surges. These findings suggest that agricultural price movements in import-constrained markets are meaningfully predictable when models capture supply-chain dynamics, offering practical value for early warning and decision making by farmers, traders, and policymakers. Existing studies on Sri Lankan vegetable prices are confined to Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) applied to single markets, with no supply-chain features, seasonal segmentation, or cross-regime validation.
Ranuga Weerasekara, Heshan Nethmina, Manuja Ranathunga +6
Jun 10, 2026cs.CV

Adapting Prithvi-EO for Fallow Detection for Food-Water Nexus: ViT-Adapter Necks and Parameter-Efficient Backbone tuning of Geospatial Foundation Model

Understanding spatial distribution of fallow land is important for optimizing the food-water (FW) nexus, given fallowing's role in crop rotation and water conservation. Fallow is a low accuracy class in USDA Cropland Data Layer (CDL). Geospatial foundation model (GFM), Prithvi-EO has shown strong transferability across computer vision tasks. However, its Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone produces features at a single spatial scale that are ill-suited for the multi-scale features required by object detection heads. Existing approaches synthesise multi-scale pyramids through scaling of single stride tokens, sacrificing spatial heterogeneity, and full backbone fine-tuning is computationally prohibitive for GFMs. We evaluate a fallow detection pipeline combining two parameter-efficient fine tuning (PEFT) schemes: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and a hybrid PEFT, with three neck designs: pseudo multi-scale, Lite ViT-Adapter, and Full ViT-Adapter. Our best configuration, Lite ViT-Adapter with a one-stage head, achieves a mAP@50 of 0.9479 with the Diou loss, suggesting the effectiveness of center-aware localization for irregular fallow field detection. ViT-Adapter free one-stage detection under LoRA improves the adapter-free anchor-based approach by 6.42%, and the best configuration improves baseline adapter-free anchor-based approach by 25.70%. These results demonstrate that lightweight spatial prior fusion and selective backbone unfreezing enable Prithvi-EO to capture local fallow patterns more effectively, outperforming approaches that rely on reshaped single-stride ViT tokens.
Sk Muhammad Asif, Orhun Aydin
Jun 8, 2026cs.LG

Crop Recommendation and Agricultural Query Answering System Using Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks and Hybrid Retrieval Augmentation

This paper presents a unified system designed to support precision agriculture by integrating advanced weather prediction, crop recommendation, and a question-answering tool for farmers. We propose two deep learning models -- a Transformer-based Graph Neural Network and a Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (STGCN) -- to forecast weather conditions for the next 30 days using data from 1,359 locations in Nepal. The STGCN outperforms the Transformer-based model in accuracy (MSE ~0.011 vs. 0.013), effectively modeling both spatial and temporal dependencies in climate data. These predictions are combined with static soil properties such as pH, moisture, and organic content to generate localized crop recommendations through a scoring algorithm that matches each crop's optimal growing conditions. Additionally, we develop a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbot that leverages domain-specific agricultural documents to answer farmers' questions in natural language. The entire system is deployed via a mobile application, offering real-time suggestions and conversational support. User feedback confirms the system's usability and relevance, especially in rural settings where personalized farming guidance is limited. Overall, our approach demonstrates how combining machine learning models with local agricultural data can empower farmers with actionable insights, promoting more informed decisions, better crop yields, and increased resilience to climate variability.
Prajwal Thapa, Yagya Raj Pandeya
Jun 4, 2026cs.CV

USU-Corn-WeedDB: A UAV RGB Image Dataset for Multi-Species Weed Detection in Forage Corn

Weed pressure in forage corn production causes yield losses of up to 31.5%, yet site-specific weed management (SSWM) systems built on UAV imagery and deep learning remain constrained by the scarcity of field-representative training datasets. We present USU-Corn-WeedDB, a publicly available UAV RGB image dataset collected from a commercial forage corn field in Cache Valley, Utah, designed to support multi-class weed detection under both supervised and semi-supervised learning frameworks. RGB imagery was acquired on 27 June 2025 using an Autel EVO II Dual 640T V2 drone at ~10m above ground level, yielding a ground sampling distance of approximately 0.48 cm/pixel. A total of 366 full-resolution images were tiled into 8,800 patches at 640 x 640-pixel resolution. Of these, 800 images were manually annotated for three weed species; common lambsquarters (Chenopodium album), redroot pigweed (Amaranthus retroflexus), and green foxtail (Setaria viridis) comprising 10,539 bounding-box instances, with the remaining 8,000 tiles retained as an unlabeled pool for semi-supervised experiments. This dataset reflects a natural class imbalance where redroot pigweed constitutes 53.86% of annotated instances, which was preserved intentionally to mirror real field conditions. To validate dataset utility, we trained 28 object detection models spanning five architecture families including YOLOv8, YOLOv9, YOLOv10, YOLO11, YOLO26, and RT-DETR under identical conditions without hyperparameter tuning. Test set mAP@0.5 ranged from 0.773 to 0.840, with lightweight models achieving competitive performance relevant to edge-deployed UAV systems. USU-Corn-WeedDB is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20044178.
Utsav Bhandari, Saroj Burlakoti, Rhonda Miller +3
May 22, 2026cs.HC

CultivAgents: Cultivating Relationship-Centered Multi-Agent Systems for Personalized Gardening

Gardening is critical to support well-being, cultural continuity, and food autonomy, yet existing digital tools often provide generic advice that overlooks gardeners' skills, local ecologies, seasons, and cultural contexts. We introduce CultivAgents, a relationship-centered multi-agent system for personalized, socio-culturally grounded gardening support. Grounded in ethics of care, CultivAgents coordinates multiple specialized agents: an Experience Agent that adapts guidance to users' skill levels, an Environmental Agent that grounds advice in local and seasonal conditions, and an Ethnobotanical Agent that connects plants to cultural knowledge and histories. We evaluated CultivAgents through a three-phase mixed-methods study with domain experts (n=3), HCI researchers (n=7), and community gardeners (n=5), analyzing expert feedback, pre/post surveys, and participatory design activities. Results suggest that CultivAgents helped gardeners translate interest into situated action: community gardeners reported increased confidence (3.00 to 3.60), motivation (4.00 to 4.40), and trust in acting on AI advice (3.20 to 4.00). Participants valued hyperlocal ecological guidance and complementary agent perspectives, while also identifying limits in cultural specificity, ecological grounding, and agent coordination. The work advances relationship-centered AI, offering design implications for multi-agent systems that support food sovereignty, community resilience, and cultural preservation.
Yiyang Wang, Moeiini Reilly, Britney Johnson +3
Apr 27, 2026cs.LG

Do Foundation Model Embeddings Improve Cross-Country Crop Yield Generalisation? A Leave-One-Country-Out Evaluation in Sub-Saharan Africa

Accurate predictions of smallholder maize yields across national boundaries are critical for food security planning in sub-Saharan Africa, yet most published benchmarks report within-country performance that overstates true generalisability. This paper evaluates whether geospatial foundation model embeddings, specifically Prithvi-EO-1.0-100M and ViT-Base, outperform traditional Sentinel-2 spectral features under a Leave-One-Country-Out cross-validation scheme on 6,404 maize field observations from five African countries. The results show a clear generalisability gap: within-country random cross-validation yields moderate R^2 values, but all feature sets perform poorly under cross-country testing, with universally negative R^2. Frozen Prithvi-EO embeddings provide no meaningful advantage over engineered spectral features for cross-country prediction in this setting. The paper argues that the main limitation is a shift in yield distribution between countries rather than representation quality and releases a reproducible negative benchmark for future work.
Yaw Osei Adjei
Jan 3, 2026cs.CV

A UAV-Based Multispectral and RGB Dataset for Multi-Stage Paddy Crop Monitoring in Indian Agricultural Fields

We present a large-scale unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based RGB and multispectral image dataset collected over paddy fields in the Vijayawada region, Andhra Pradesh, India, covering nursery to harvesting stages. We used a 20-megapixel RGB camera and a 5-megapixel four-band multispectral camera capturing red, green, red-edge, and near-infrared bands. Standardised operating procedure (SOP) and checklists were developed to ensure repeatable data acquisition. Our dataset comprises of 42,430 raw images (415 GB) captured over 5 acres with 1 cm/pixel ground sampling distance (GSD) with associated metadata such as GPS coordinates, flight altitude, and environmental conditions. Captured images were validated using Pix4D Fields to generate orthomosaic maps and vegetation index maps, such as normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) and normalised difference red-edge (NDRE) index. Our dataset is one of the few datasets that provide high-resolution images with rich metadata that cover all growth stages of Indian paddy crops. The dataset is available on IEEE DataPort with DOI, . It can support studies on targeted spraying, disease analysis, and yield estimation.
Adari Rama Sukanya, Puvvula Roopesh Naga Sri Sai, Bodduru Neshika +1