Domain Adaptation for Big Data in Agricultural Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Review

With the wide application of computer vision in agriculture, image analysis has become the key to tasks such as crop health monitoring and pest detection. However, the significant domain shifts caused by environmental changes, different crop types, and diverse data acquisition methods seriously hinder the generalization ability of the model in cross-region, cross-season, and complex agricultural scenarios. This paper explores how domain adaptation (DA) techniques can address these challenges to improve cross-domain transferability in agricultural image analysis. DA is considered a promising solution in the case of limited labeled data, insufficient model adaptability, and dynamic changes in the field environment. This paper systematically reviews the latest advances in DA in agricultural images in recent years, focusing on application scenarios such as crop health monitoring, pest and disease detection, and fruit identification, in which DA methods have significantly improved cross-domain performance. We categorize DA methods into shallow learning and deep learning methods, including supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised strategies, and pay special attention to the adversarial learning-based techniques that perform well in complex scenarios. In addition, this paper also reviews the main public datasets of agricultural images, and evaluates their advantages and limitations in DA research. Overall, this study provides a complete framework and some key insights that can be used as a reference for the research and development of domain adaptation methods in future agricultural vision tasks.