A survey of few-shot learning in smart agriculture: developments, applications, and challenges

With the rise of artificial intelligence, deep learning is gradually applied to the field of agriculture and plant science. However, the excellent performance of deep learning needs to be established on massive numbers of samples. In the field of plant science and biology, it is not easy to obtain a large amount of labeled data. The emergence of few-shot learning solves this problem. It imitates the ability of humans’ rapid learning and can learn a new task with only a small number of labeled samples, which greatly reduces the time cost and financial resources. At present, the advanced few-shot learning methods are mainly divided into four categories based on: data augmentation, metric learning, external memory, and parameter optimization, solving the over-fitting problem from different viewpoints. This review comprehensively expounds on few-shot learning in smart agriculture, introduces the definition of few-shot learning, four kinds of learning methods, the publicly available datasets for few-shot learning, various applications in smart agriculture, and the challenges in smart agriculture in future development.