The rapid growth of the global population has placed immense pressure on agriculture to enhance food production while addressing environmental and socioeconomic challenges such as biodiversity loss, water scarcity, and climate variability. Addressing these challenges requires adopting modern techniques and advancing agricultural research. Although some techniques, such as machine learning and deep learning, are increasingly used in agriculture, progress is constrained by the lack of large labelled datasets. This constraint arises because collecting data is often time-consuming, labour-intensive, and requires expert knowledge for data annotation. To mitigate data limitations, transfer learning (TL) offers a viable solution by allowing pre-trained models to be adapted for agricultural applications. Many researchers have demonstrated TL’s potential to advance agriculture. Despite its importance, there is a lack of a comprehensive review, which could be essential to guide researchers in this field. Given the significance and the lack of a review paper, this paper provides a review dedicated to TL in agriculture, offering three main contributions. First, we provide an in-depth background study on TL and its applications in agriculture. Second, we offer a comprehensive examination of TL-based agricultural applications, covering pre-trained models, dataset sources, input image types, implementation platforms, and TL approaches. Third, based on an exploration of the existing studies, we identify the challenges faced when applying TL in agriculture. Finally, to address the identified challenges, we recommend suggestions for future research directions.

The agricultural sector in Bangladesh is a cornerstone of the nation's economy, with key crops such as rice, corn, wheat, potato, and tomato playing vital roles. However, these crops are highly vulnerable to various leaf diseases, which pose significant threats to crop yields and food security if not promptly addressed. Consequently, there is an urgent need for an automated system that can accurately identify and categorize leaf diseases, enabling early intervention and management. This study explores the efficacy of the latest state-of-the-art object detection model, YOLOv8 (You Only Look Once), in surpassing previous models for the automated detection and categorization of leaf diseases in these five major crops. By leveraging modern computer vision techniques, the goal is to enhance the efficiency of disease detection and management. A dataset comprising 19 classes, each with 150 images, totaling 2850 images, was meticulously curated and annotated for training and evaluation. The YOLOv8 framework, known for its capability to detect multiple objects simultaneously, was employed to train a deep neural network. The system's performance was evaluated using standard metrics such as mean Average Precision (mAP) and F1 score. The findings demonstrate that the YOLOv8 framework successfully identifies leaf diseases, achieving a high mAP of 98% and an F1 score of 97%. These results underscore the significant potential of this approach to enhance crop disease management, thereby improving food security and promoting agricultural sustainability in Bangladesh.

Agriculture has a crucial role in both the economy and food supply. However, the frequent occurrence of plant diseases can have a significant negative influence on the production of foods. Timely detection of a disease is important for its effective management, e.g., targeted use of pesticides. Conventional Plant Disease Detection (PDD) methods are manual, slow, tedious, and prone to errors, thereby increasing the risk of significant yield losses. Recently, various data-driven approaches, including Deep Learning and Computer Vision-based approaches, have been explored for PDD. However, the scarcity of large and annotated datasets and the limited scalability of these approaches have prompted researchers to turn to the Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) approach. In this review, we provide the very first conceptual grounding for the SSL approach in PDD. By reviewing a large body of recent related works in the literature, we thoroughly analyse and categorise them into generative, predictive, contrastive and hybrid SSL models. Moreover, this review analyses various recent datasets and performance metrics used in these models. Finally, we explain the research challenges and key research directions aimed at advancing PDD through the SSL approach.

This study develops a grid-connected solar PV–biogas microgrid for a five-story residential building in Rajshahi, Bangladesh, optimized using HOMER Pro. Among six configurations, the optimal configuration, integrating solar PV and a biogas generator, achieves a 59.4% renewable fraction, reducing CO₂ emissions by 46% and lowering the cost of energy to $0.0306/kWh. The system’s net present cost is $46,813, with an annual operating cost of $1,187. It generates 31,168 kWh/year from solar PV and 3,040 kWh/year from biogas, with grid purchases and sales of 21,951 kWh/year and 13,411 kWh/year, respectively. Predictive modeling (R² = 1.0) enhances power estimation accuracy. MATLAB-based stability analysis confirms seamless voltage and frequency integration. A demand response strategy achieves 2,730.44 kWh/year savings, reducing non-renewable reliance. Sensitivity analysis identifies solar irradiance as the dominant cost factor. The results establish a scalable, cost-effective model for residential renewable microgrid adoption globally.

As a fundamental but difficult topic in computer vision, 3D object segmentation has various applications in medical image analysis, autonomous vehicles, robotics, virtual reality, lithium battery image analysis, etc. In the past, 3D segmentation was performed using hand-made features and design techniques, but these techniques could not generalize to vast amounts of data or reach acceptable accuracy. Deep learning techniques have lately emerged as the preferred method for 3D segmentation jobs as a result of their extraordinary performance in 2D computer vision. Our proposed method used a CNN-based architecture called 3D UNET, which is inspired by the famous 2D UNET that has been used to segment volumetric image data. To see the internal changes of composite materials, for instance, in a lithium battery image, it is necessary to see the flow of different materials and follow the directions analyzing the inside properties. In this paper, a combination of 3D UNET and VGG19 has been used to conduct a multiclass segmentation of publicly available sandstone datasets to analyze their microstructures using image data based on four different objects in the samples of volumetric data. In our image sample, there are a total of 448 2D images, which are then aggregated as one 3D volume to examine the 3D volumetric data. The solution involves the segmentation of each object in the volume data and further analysis of each object to find its average size, area percentage, total area, etc. The open-source image processing package IMAGEJ is used for further analysis of individual particles. In this study, it was demonstrated that convolutional neural networks can be trained to recognize sandstone microstructure traits with an accuracy of 96.78% and an IOU of 91.12%. According to our knowledge, many prior works have applied 3D UNET for segmentation, but very few papers extend it further to show the details of particles in the sample. The proposed solution offers a computational insight for real-time implementation and is discovered to be superior to the current state-of-the-art methods. The result has importance for the creation of an approximately similar model for the microstructural analysis of volumetric data.

Lane marking recognition is one of the most crucial features for automotive vehicles as it is one of the most fundamental requirements of all the autonomy features of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Researchers have recently made promising improvements in the application of Lane Marking Detection (LMD). This research article has taken the initiative to review lane marking detection, mainly using deep learning techniques. This paper initially discusses the introduction of lane marking detection approaches using deep neural networks and conventional techniques. Lane marking detection frameworks can be categorized into single-stage and two-stage architectures. This paper elaborates on the network’s architecture and the loss function for improving the performance based on the categories. The network’s architecture is divided into object detection, classification, and segmentation, and each is discussed, including their contributions and limitations. There is also a brief indication of the simplification and optimization of the network for simplifying the architecture. Additionally, comparative performance results with a visualization of the final output of five existing techniques is elaborated. Finally, this review is concluded by pointing to particular challenges in lane marking detection, such as generalization problems and computational complexity. There is also a brief future direction for solving the issues, for instance, efficient neural network, Meta, and unsupervised learning.