Artificial Intelligence in Horticultural Crop Improvement

HorticultureHorticulture has been extensively studied and practiced for thousands of years. HorticultureHorticulture is concerned with producing, processing, and merchandising techniques for fruitsFruit, vegetablesVegetables, flowers, spices, mushrooms, medicinal, ornamental, and aromatic plantsAromatic plants. The horticultureHorticulture sector faces significant barriers, such as an infestation of various diseasesDisease and pests on the plants, inappropriate gradingGrading of productsProduct, poor quality control strategies, improper managementManagement of irrigation, and declination of soil fertilitySoil fertility. As a result, the cultivators face huge crop and revenue losses. In most cases, layman cultivators suffer from adequate knowledge and expertise to handle these issues. To ensure sustained productivityProductivity, sufficient knowledge, and judgment of human experts are required in time. However, such experts are very scarce compared to the demands of the growing cultivation worldwide. This leads to the degradation of both the quantity and quality of horticulturalHorticultural productsProduct. To mitigate the lack of sufficient human experts, automated computer-based decision support systemsDecision support systems using artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence techniques have been deployed in various horticultureHorticulture sectors for precise decision-making. Since 1985, applicationsApplications of several such systems based on artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence techniques have been attempted for horticulturalHorticultural crop improvementImprovement. This chapter briefly describes the basic structures of six popular artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence techniques and some remarkable applicationsApplications in horticulturalHorticultural crop improvementImprovement.