A Comprehensive Review of Diffusion Models in Smart Agriculture: Progress, Applications, and Challenges

With the global population growing and arable land resources becoming increasingly scarce,smart agriculture and precision agriculture have emerged as key directions for the future ofagricultural development.Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, particularly deep learning models, have found widespread applications in areas such as crop monitoring and pest detection. As an emerging generative model, diffusion models have shown significant promise in tasks like agricultural image processing, data augmentation, and remote sensing. Compared to traditional generative adversarial networks (GANs), diffusion models offer superior training stability and generation quality, effectively addressing challenges such as limited agricultural data and imbalanced image samples. This paper reviews the latest advancements in the application of diffusion models in agriculture, focusing on their potential in crop pest and disease detection, remote sensing image enhancement, crop growth prediction, and agricultural resource management. Experimental results demonstrate that diffusion models significantly improve model accuracy and robustness in data augmentation, image generation, and denoising, especially in complex environments. Despite challenges related to computational efficiency and generalization capabilities, diffusion models are expected to play an increasingly important role in smart and precision agriculture as technology advances, providing substantial support for the sustainable development of global agriculture.