Utilization of remote sensing is a new wave of modern agriculture that accelerates plant breeding and research, and the performance of farming practices and farm management. High-throughput phenotyping is a key advanced agricultural technology and has been rapidly adopted in plant research. However, technology adoption is not easy due to cost limitations in academia. This article reviews various commercial unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms as a high-throughput phenotyping technology for plant breeding. It compares known commercial UAV platforms that are cost-effective and manageable in field settings and demonstrates a general workflow for high-throughput phenotyping, including data analysis. The authors expect this article to create opportunities for academics to access new technologies and utilize the information for their research and breeding programs in more workable ways.

Accurately estimating crop cultivation areas is critical for predicting yields and managing overproduction, particularly for staple crops grown in regions like Jeju Island, South Korea, where reporting cultivation areas is mandatory. This study developed a modified U-Net architecture for semantic segmentation, utilizing UAV-based high-resolution imagery in the open-source NIA AI HUB dataset. The dataset includes labeled RGB images of six winter crops—white radish, cabbage, onion, garlic, broccoli, and carrot—grown on Jeju Island, a key agricultural hub. The proposed model incorporates a ResNet-34 backbone, Attention Gates, and Residual Modules, achieving a mean F1 score of 85.4% and an intersection over union (IoU) of 74.6%, outperforming the original U-Net. This advancement significantly reduces misclassifications among visually similar crops, such as garlic and onion. Application to three unknown fields demonstrated an average prediction accuracy of 90.2%, effectively estimating cultivation areas with high precision. By leveraging public datasets and innovative AI techniques, this study highlights the scalability and practicality of the proposed model in enhancing precision agriculture. These findings demonstrate the model’s potential to improve crop yield prediction, optimize resource allocation, and support sustainable farming practices in diverse agricultural environments.

Ever since research attention was first paid to phenomics, it has mainly focused on the use of high throughput phenotyping for characterizing traits in an accurate and fast manner. It was recently realized that its use has huge potential in precision agriculture. However, the focus so far has mainly been on ”obtain large data set”, not on “how to analyze them”. Here, the expanded application of high throughput phenotyping combined with special dependence analysis is demonstrated to reveal the hidden field heterogeneity, using a kenaf field. Based on the method used in the study, the results showed that the growth of kenaf in the field was grouped into two, which led to a large variation of sources among replications. This method has potential to be applied to detect hidden heterogeneity, to be utilized and applied in plant breeding not only for better analysis, but also for better management of fields in precision agriculture.

The investigation of quantitative phenotypic traits resulting from the interaction between targeted genotypic traits and environmental factors is essential for breeding selection. Therefore, plot-wise controlled environmental factors must be invariable for accurate identification of phenotypes. However, the assumption of homogeneous variables within the open-field is not always accepted, and requires a spatial dependence analysis to determine whether site-specific environmental factors exist. In this study, spatial dependence within the kenaf breeding field was assessed in a geo-tagged height map derived from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Local indicators of spatial autocorrelation (LISA) were applied to the height map using Geoda software, and the LISA map was generated in order to recognize the existence of kenaf height status clusters. The spatial dependence of the breeding field used in this study appeared in a specific region. The cluster pattern was similar to the terrain elevation pattern of this field and highly correlated with drainage capacity. The cluster pattern could be utilized to design random blocks based on regions that have similar spatial dependence. We confirmed the potential of spatial dependence analysis on a crop growth status map, derived by UAV, for breeding strategy design with a tight budget.