A Review on Sensing Technologies for High-Throughput Plant Phenotyping

The current epidemic, population growth, and decreasing arable lands lead to a severe food crisis, which calls for productive and efficient agricultural methods to ensure a sustainable food supply for mankind. Crop monitoring is considered to be a potential solution for the improvement of food production. Current crop monitoring combines agriculture methodologies with other advanced technologies, including sensing technology, geographical information systems (GIS), Internet of Things (IoT), information and communication technology (ICT), robotics, and drone techniques to increase production with low labor cost. The high-throughput plant phenotyping is crucial for crop monitoring on the data acquisition of large-scale crop characteristics. The high-throughput plant phenotyping studies aim to achieve fast and precise large-scale crop monitoring techniques with minimum environmental impact by applying special plant phenotyping platforms. The phenotyping platforms are integrated with various sensors and data communication systems, which can help to achieve automatic data acquisition and transmission. This paper reviews the current high-throughput plant phenotyping development in crop monitoring, including sensors, communication protocols, data management, and plant phenotyping platforms. State-of-art challenges are reviewed and discussed. Also, the paper provides discussions on the current situation, upcoming challenges, and possible future trends for researchers in this field.