In human's life plant plays an important part to balance the nature and supply food-&-medicine. The traditional manual plant species identification method is tedious and time-consuming process and requires expert knowledge. The rapid developments of mobile and ubiquitous computing make automated plant biometric system really feasible and accessible for anyone-anywhere-anytime. More and more research are ongoing to make it a more realistic tool for common man to access the agro-information by just a click. Based on this, the chapter highlights the significant growth of plant identification and leaf disease recognition over past few years. A wide range of research analysis is shown in this chapter in this context. Finally, the chapter showed the future scope and applications of AaaS and similar systems in agro-field.
TopIntroduction1
At the beginning of this century, there was a tremendous technological revolution in the field of wireless communication and mobile technology. Mobile and ubiquitous computers are increasing their magnitude in every small, portable, wireless computing and communication fields. The technological omnipresence of ubiquitous devices invisibly activates the world by providing accessibility anywhere-anytime computing. However, this revolution is still slow in the agricultural sphere, despite the advancements in technologies making it possible to build and deploy wireless sensor networks (WSN) in fields that would radically improves the farming efficiencies. This is because the current wireless technologies are too expensive and complicated for farmers to use especially in the developing countries like India. Two-way radios have long been used by farmers in many such developed countries with large farmlands to contact their employees, farm suppliers, equipment dealers, agents, buyers and farm awareness. Today, world-wide availability of smartphones and cellular networks, the use of mobile phones in agricultural sector is popularly, replacing the use of two-way radios (Wang, Li, Zhu, & Xu, 2016). The advantage of using two-way radios and mobile phones is that these wireless tools are relatively cheap and very simple to use. Additionally, smartphones have several important advantages such as all the brands of mobile phones are generally compatible for running various types of application software, and are equipped with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, camera(s) and GPS capabilities.
In Asia-Pacific region, India has outscored the other nations in terms of the number of mobile users. With such rapidly increasing tele-density, mobile penetration in rural areas is also growing strongly. These days, mobile phones are available to people even in rural India, especially among the agrarian community. Motivated by the advancement in mobile technology and the wide-spread use of phones in India, as discussed above, researchers are aiming to help the illiterate agrarian community to improve their agricultural activities through the use of mobile phones. Thus, a new agro-information technology needs to be introduced in order to bridge the gaps between the real and digital objects via mobile computing (MC) and augmented reality (AR).
Agricultural Scenario
In developing countries, agriculture accounts the major role of rural employment and holds the promise for socio-economic growth. In fact, agro-community is roughly five-times more effective in raising the income of poor farmers compared to any other sector. Agricultural improvement also directly impacts on the hunger and malnutrition and thus plays a significant role in decreasing the occurrences of famine. However, the growing global population has heightened the demand for foods. Due to the lack of infrastructure in rural areas, raising the food prices and the climatic change and the real effective and “smart” agriculture is essential. Together with geographic information systems (GIS) and virtual reality (VR) smartphones can play an important role in precision agriculture environment (Bakhsh, Colvin, Jaynes, Kanwar, & Tim, 2000; Jain, Tim, & Jolly, 1995; Tim, 1995). Some of the uses of on-farm wireless network technologies in improving the agricultural productions are discussed in (Vellidis et al. 2007; Izzat, Ismail, Mehat, & Haroon, 2009; Revenaz, Ruggeri, & Martelli, 2010).