Internet of Things (IoT)-based automation of agricultural events can change the agriculture sector from being static and manual to dynamic and smart, leading to enhanced production with reduced human efforts. Precision Agriculture (PA) along with Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are the main drivers of automation in the agriculture domain. PA uses specific sensors and software to ensure that the crops receive exactly what they need to optimize productivity and sustainability. PA includes retrieving real data about the conditions of soil, crops and weather from the sensors deployed in the fields. High-resolution images of crops are obtained from satellite or air-borne platforms (manned or unmanned), which are further processed to extract information used to provide future decisions. In this paper, a review of near and remote sensor networks in the agriculture domain is presented along with several considerations and challenges. This survey includes wireless communication technologies, sensors, and wireless nodes used to assess the environmental behaviour, the platforms used to obtain spectral images of crops, the common vegetation indices used to analyse spectral images and applications of WSN in agriculture. As a proof of concept, we present a case study showing how WSN-based PA system can be implemented. We propose an IoT-based smart solution for crop health monitoring, which is comprised of two modules. The first module is a wireless sensor network-based system to monitor real-time crop health status. The second module uses a low altitude remote sensing platform to obtain multi-spectral imagery, which is further processed to classify healthy and unhealthy crops. We also highlight the results obtained using a case study and list the challenges and future directions based on our work.

Water makes up about 70% of the earth’s surface and is one of the most important sources vital to sustaining life. Rapid urbanization and industrialization have led to a deterioration of water quality at an alarming rate, resulting in harrowing diseases. Water quality has been conventionally estimated through expensive and time-consuming lab and statistical analyses, which render the contemporary notion of real-time monitoring moot. The alarming consequences of poor water quality necessitate an alternative method, which is quicker and inexpensive. With this motivation, this research explores a series of supervised machine learning algorithms to estimate the water quality index (WQI), which is a singular index to describe the general quality of water, and the water quality class (WQC), which is a distinctive class defined on the basis of the WQI. The proposed methodology employs four input parameters, namely, temperature, turbidity, pH and total dissolved solids. Of all the employed algorithms, gradient boosting, with a learning rate of 0.1 and polynomial regression, with a degree of 2, predict the WQI most efficiently, having a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.9642 and 2.7273, respectively. Whereas multi-layer perceptron (MLP), with a configuration of (3, 7), classifies the WQC most efficiently, with an accuracy of 0.8507. The proposed methodology achieves reasonable accuracy using a minimal number of parameters to validate the possibility of its use in real time water quality detection systems.

Crop classification in early phenological stages has been a difficult task due to spectrum similarity of different crops. For this purpose, low altitude platforms such as drones have great potential to provide high resolution optical imagery where Machine Learning (ML) applied to classify different types of crops. In this research work, crop classification is performed at different phenological stages using optical images which are obtained from drone. For this purpose, gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) based features are extracted from underlying gray scale images collected by the drone. To classify the different types of crops, different ML algorithms including Random Forest (RF), Naive Bayes (NB), Neural Network (NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are applied. The results showed that the ML algorithms performed much better on GLCM features as compared to gray scale images with a margin of 13.65% in overall accuracy.

The rapid urbanization and industrial development have resulted in water contamination and water quality deterioration at an alarming rate, deeming its quick, inexpensive and accurate detection imperative. Conventional methods to measure water quality are lengthy, expensive and inefficient, including the manual analysis process carried out in a laboratory. The research work in this paper focuses on the problem from various perspectives, including the traditional methods of determining water quality to gain insight into the problem and the analysis of state-of-the-art technologies, including Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning techniques to address water quality. After analyzing the currently available solutions, this paper proposes an IoT-based low-cost system employing machine learning techniques to monitor water quality in real time, analyze water quality trends and detect anomalous events such as intentional contamination of water.

The agriculture sector holds paramount importance in Pakistan due to the intrinsic agrarian nature of the economy. Pakistan has its GDP based on agriculture, however it relies on manual monitoring of crops, which is a labour intensive and ineffective method. In contrast to this, several cutting edge technology-based solutions are being employed in the developed countries to enhance the crop yield with the optimal use of resources. To this end, we have proposed an integrated approach for monitoring crop health using IoT, machine learning and drone technology. The integration of these sensing modalities generate heterogeneous data which not only varies in nature (i.e. observed parameter) but also has different temporal fidelity. The spatial resolution of these methods is also different, hence, the optimal integration of these sensing modalities and their implementation in practice are addressed in the proposed system. In our proposed solution, the IoT sensors provide the real-time status of environmental parameters impacting the crop, and the drone platform provide the multispectral data used for generating Vegetation Indices (VIs) such as Normalized Difference vegetation Index (NDVI) for analyzing the crop health. The NDVI provides information about the crop based on the chlorophyll content, which offers limited information regarding the crop health. In order to obtain a rich and detailed knowledge about crop health, the variable length time series data of IoT sensors and multispectral images were converted to a fixed-sized representation to generate crop health maps. A number of machine and deep learning algorithms were applied on the collected data wherein deep neural network with two hidden layers was found to be the most optimal model among all the selected models, providing an accuracy of (98.4%). Further, the health maps were validated through ground surveys and by agriculture experts due to the absence of reference data. The proposed research is basically an indigenous, technology based agriculture solution capable of providing important insights into the crop health by extracting complementary features from multi-modal data set, and minimizing the crop ground survey effort, particularly useful when the agriculture land is large in size.