Multi-Background UAV Spraying Behavior Recognition Dataset for Precision Agriculture

The rapid growth of precision agriculture has accelerated the deployment of plant protection unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, reliable data resources for vision-based intelligent supervision of operational states, such as whether a UAV is currently spraying, remain limited. Most publicly available UAV detection datasets target urban security and surveillance scenarios, where annotations emphasize object localization rather than agricultural operation state recognition, making them insufficient for farmland spraying supervision. Therefore, agricultural-oriented data resources are needed to cover diverse backgrounds and include operation state labels, thereby supporting both academic research and practical deployment. In this study, we construct and release the first multi-background dataset dedicated to agricultural UAV spraying behavior recognition. The dataset contains 9548 high-quality annotated images spanning the following six typical backgrounds: green cropland, bare farmland, orchard, woodland, mountainous terrain, and sky. For each UAV instance, we provide both a bounding box and a binary operation state label, namely spraying and flying without spraying. We further conduct systematic benchmark evaluations of mainstream object detection algorithms on this dataset. The dataset captures agriculture-specific challenges, including a high proportion of small objects, substantial scale variation, motion blur, and complex dynamic backgrounds, and can be used to assess algorithm robustness in real-world agricultural settings. Benchmark results show that YOLOv5n achieves the best overall performance, with an accuracy of 97.86% and an mAP@50 of 98.30%. This dataset provides critical data support for automated supervision of plant protection UAV spraying operations and precision agriculture monitoring platforms.

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Publication Details

Journal
Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks
Published
2026-01-26
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan15010014
Primary Topic
Smart Agriculture and AI
Type
article
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article

Multi-Background UAV Spraying Behavior Recognition Dataset for Precision Agriculture

Meng Chang, Leijing Bai, Lei Shu
Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks
Smart Agriculture and AI
article

Multi-Background UAV Spraying Behavior Recognition Dataset for Precision Agriculture

Meng Chang, Leijing Bai, Lei Shu
article en

Abstract

The rapid growth of precision agriculture has accelerated the deployment of plant protection unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, reliable data resources for vision-based intelligent supervision of operational states, such as whether a UAV is currently spraying, remain limited. Most publicly available UAV detection datasets target urban security and surveillance scenarios, where annotations emphasize object localization rather than agricultural operation state recognition, making them insufficient for farmland spraying supervision. Therefore, agricultural-oriented data resources are needed to cover diverse backgrounds and include operation state labels, thereby supporting both academic research and practical deployment. In this study, we construct and release the first multi-background dataset dedicated to agricultural UAV spraying behavior recognition. The dataset contains 9548 high-quality annotated images spanning the following six typical backgrounds: green cropland, bare farmland, orchard, woodland, mountainous terrain, and sky. For each UAV instance, we provide both a bounding box and a binary operation state label, namely spraying and flying without spraying. We further conduct systematic benchmark evaluations of mainstream object detection algorithms on this dataset. The dataset captures agriculture-specific challenges, including a high proportion of small objects, substantial scale variation, motion blur, and complex dynamic backgrounds, and can be used to assess algorithm robustness in real-world agricultural settings. Benchmark results show that YOLOv5n achieves the best overall performance, with an accuracy of 97.86% and an mAP@50 of 98.30%. This dataset provides critical data support for automated supervision of plant protection UAV spraying operations and precision agriculture monitoring platforms.

Journal of Sensor and Actuator NetworksVol. 15(1)
Nanjing Agricultural University (CN), Nanyang Technological University (SG), University of Lincoln (GB)
Zero hunger
Openalex Percentile: Top 78%
Smart Agriculture and AI
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Multi-Background UAV Spraying Behavior Recognition Dataset for Precision Agriculture — Meng Chang, Leijing Bai, et al. · Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS