Sattar Muhammad Awais, Laila Dina Shona
Automatic Control, Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden.
Front Plant Sci. 2025 Jul 7;16:1620868. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1620868. eCollection 2025.
Pursuing agricultural intensification to raise productivity has brought challenges such as involvement of high capitals, often in the form of loans, environmental damage, and ecosystem disruption. These challenges increase risks in agricultural practice that require good management and control. This increases the need for real-time, non-destructive monitoring technologies that can improve crop productivity, enhance land use, and facilitate environmentally friendly agriculture. Due to its unique capacity to non-destructively examine plants' internal biological and structural properties, ultrasound has emerged as a promising non-invasive technique providing insights often unattainable with traditional optical, spectral, or chemical sensors. This review aims to provide an up-to-date state of the art in ultrasound-based monitoring applications within major agricultural areas: soil characterization, seed quality control, plant health, stress monitoring, pests and diseases detection, and fruit ripening assessment. This review explores how contact and non-contact ultrasound measurements are scalable and versatile, bridging the gaps between laboratory and field-deployed systems. Integrating ultrasound monitoring with artificial intelligence and Internet of Things (IOT) frameworks further enhances modality accuracy and can detect stress, diseases, and other physiological changes in crops sooner. Overcoming challenges such as environmental acoustic noise will require further work. Still, recent advances such as improved signal filtering algorithms, new transducer designs, better field sensitivity, and broader collaboration to standardize ultrasound measurement protocols indicate a growing trend toward increased on-field use of ultrasound. Finally, the review also discusses the current limitations and future research directions of how ultrasound-based monitoring can catalyse a new paradigm of sustainable data-driven agriculture that meets food security needs.
追求农业集约化以提高生产力带来了诸多挑战，如通常以贷款形式投入的高额资本、环境破坏和生态系统紊乱。这些挑战增加了农业实践中的风险，需要良好的管理和控制。这就增加了对实时、无损监测技术的需求，这些技术可以提高作物产量、提升土地利用效率并促进环境友好型农业。由于超声具有独特的无损检测植物内部生物学和结构特性的能力，它已成为一种很有前景的非侵入性技术，能提供传统光学、光谱或化学传感器通常无法获得的见解。本综述旨在介绍主要农业领域基于超声监测应用的最新技术现状：土壤特性表征、种子质量控制、植物健康、胁迫监测、病虫害检测以及果实成熟度评估。本综述探讨了接触式和非接触式超声测量如何具有可扩展性和通用性，弥合实验室系统与现场部署系统之间的差距。将超声监测与人工智能和物联网（IoT）框架相结合，可进一步提高模态准确性，并能更快地检测作物中的胁迫、疾病和其他生理变化。克服诸如环境噪声等挑战还需要进一步努力。不过，诸如改进信号滤波算法、新型换能器设计、更好的现场灵敏度以及为标准化超声测量协议开展更广泛合作等最新进展，表明超声在田间的使用呈增长趋势。最后，本综述还讨论了基于超声监测在推动实现满足粮食安全需求的可持续数据驱动型农业新范式方面目前存在的局限性和未来的研究方向。
