Application of Hyperspectral Technology in Agriculture

A special issue of AgriEngineering (ISSN 2624-7402). This special issue belongs to the section "Computer Applications and Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 April 2027 | Viewed by 412

Editor


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Guest Editor
College of Electrical Engineering and Information, Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin, China
Interests: hyperspectral imaging in agriculture; non-destructive evaluation of crop and seed quality; soil property assessment using spectral techniques; machine learning and deep learning for hyperspectral data analysis; sensing systems for precision and smart agriculture

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid development of hyperspectral imaging and sensing technologies has provided powerful tools for acquiring detailed spectral and spatial information from agricultural systems. Compared with conventional imaging or point-based spectral measurements, hyperspectral techniques enable non-destructive, high-throughput, and fine-scale characterization of crops, seeds, and soils, offering new opportunities for precision agriculture and smart farming.

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to this Special Issue, which brings together recent studies applying hyperspectral approaches to crop quality assessment, stress and damage detection, seed vigor evaluation, and soil property estimation. When combined with advanced data analysis methods, such as machine learning, deep learning, and sensor fusion, hyperspectral techniques allow for more accurate interpretation of complex spectral responses and improved prediction of key agronomic traits. Moreover, the integration of hyperspectral sensing with field phenotyping platforms, unmanned systems, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is accelerating the transition from laboratory-based research to real-world agricultural applications.

This Special Issue aims to provide a focused forum for recent advances in the application of hyperspectral imaging and sensing technologies in smart agriculture. The scope of the issue covers both methodological developments and practical applications, with particular emphasis on crop and soil quality evaluation, non-destructive testing, and data-driven modeling approaches that support precision management and decision-making in agriculture. The topic is closely aligned with the journal’s scope in agricultural engineering and emerging sensing technologies.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and review papers are welcome. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Hyperspectral imaging for crop quality, stress, and disease detection.
  • Non-destructive evaluation of seed vigor, aging, and physiological status.
  • Hyperspectral methods for soil property estimation and soil quality assessment.
  • Spectral data preprocessing, feature extraction, and band selection strategies.
  • Machine learning and deep learning methods for hyperspectral agricultural data.
  • Fusion of hyperspectral data with other sensors (RGB, thermal, LiDAR, and IoT).
  • Field and laboratory hyperspectral phenotyping platforms.
  • Practical applications of hyperspectral sensing in precision and smart agriculture.

We believe that this Special Issue will contribute to a deeper understanding of how hyperspectral technologies can be effectively applied to agricultural systems and will promote the exchange of ideas between researchers working on sensing technologies, data analysis, and agricultural applications.

We look forward to receiving your valuable contributions.

Prof. Dr. Kezhu Tan
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • hyperspectral imaging
  • smart agriculture
  • crop quality assessment
  • soil properties
  • non-destructive testing
  • precision agriculture
  • machine learning
  • deep learning
  • sensor fusion

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

37 pages, 19421 KB  
Article
An Improved YOLO11n-Seg Method for RGB-Based Orange Fruit Instance Segmentation Toward Clean ROI Extraction for HSI-Assisted Observation
by Xinyang Li, Jinghao Shi, Chuang Wang, Xin Yue, Weiqi Sun, Zonghui Zhuo and Kezhu Tan
AgriEngineering 2026, 8(5), 198; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriengineering8050198 - 19 May 2026
Viewed by 192
Abstract
Accurate instance segmentation of oranges in complex orchard environments is crucial for obtaining clean regions of interest (ROIs). Coarse region extraction may include non-target pixels from leaves, shadows, background, and adjacent fruits, thereby increasing boundary pixel mixing in subsequent hyperspectral-assisted observation. This study [...] Read more.
Accurate instance segmentation of oranges in complex orchard environments is crucial for obtaining clean regions of interest (ROIs). Coarse region extraction may include non-target pixels from leaves, shadows, background, and adjacent fruits, thereby increasing boundary pixel mixing in subsequent hyperspectral-assisted observation. This study proposes an improved lightweight YOLO11n-Seg method as an RGB-based visual front-end for cleaner single-fruit ROI extraction. Its contribution lies in the task-oriented integration of three complementary components: a Local Deformable Convolution Backbone (LDC-Backbone) for representing irregular and occluded fruit contours, a Boundary-Guided GSConv (BG-GSConv) module for efficiently fusing shallow boundary details with deep semantic features, and an ROI-Purity-Oriented Dice Boundary Loss for constraining mask integrity and boundary adherence. Evaluated on a complex orchard dataset, the improved model achieved a Mask mAP@0.5 of 0.962, a Mask mAP@0.5:0.95 of 0.692, a Box mAP@0.5 of 0.942, and an inference speed of 101 FPS with 3.20 M parameters. Background leakage analysis further showed that the proposed model reduced the inclusion of non-fruit pixels in extracted ROIs, supporting cleaner mask-based single-fruit region extraction. Preliminary ROI-based reflectance observation indicated that the reflectance curves obtained from the improved-model ROIs were closer to those of manually referenced pure ROIs than those obtained from the baseline extraction. These results suggest that the proposed method can serve as a real-time RGB-based front-end for cleaner single-fruit ROI extraction and later hyperspectral-assisted sampling. Complete closed-loop spectral quality modeling with paired RGB–HSI data remains a direction for future work. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Hyperspectral Technology in Agriculture)
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