A Data-Centric Review of Plant Disease Datasets: Taxonomy, Critical Analysis, Environmental Variability, and Implications for Precision Agriculture

2026-10-05

AI Summary

This study addresses the limited field generalization of plant disease detection models caused by environmental homogeneity and class imbalance in laboratory datasets. To this end, we construct a dataset taxonomy to systematically analyze the effects of multi-scale imbalance—within-class, cross-crop, and cross-dataset—and environmental variation. By integrating visual deep learning with multimodal environmental parameters such as temperature and humidity, and employing dataset bias analysis alongside standardization techniques, we evaluate and enhance the dynamic predictive robustness of these models. Furthermore, this work identifies critical research gaps regarding existing data biases, providing a theoretical foundation and strategic direction for developing next-generation multimodal frameworks tailored to precision agriculture.

Abstract

Despite rapid advances in artificial intelligence, reliable real-world plant disease detection remains a persistent challenge. Visual and deep learning approaches have shown promising results, but their deployment under field conditions remains limited. A key bottleneck is the reliance on laboratory-generated datasets that lack environmental diversity, realistic backgrounds, and balanced class distributions, resulting in poor generalization. In contrast, datasets collected directly from agricultural environments capture natural variability and better reflect challenges faced by farmers across regions. This review presents a critical analysis of visual and deep learning approaches for plant disease detection, with emphasis on plant disease datasets. It establishes a taxonomy based on acquisition setting, accessibility, plant diversity, disease composition, class structure, and imbalance severity, and examines their implications for model generalization and real-world deployment. A comparative analysis of laboratory and real-field datasets identifies critical gaps that hinder disease detection. The review further analyzes how multi-level dataset imbalance, including intra-class, inter-crop, and cross-dataset imbalance, and limited environmental variability affect model performance and robustness, an area insufficiently examined in existing surveys. Beyond image-based approaches, it highlights the importance of integrating environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, and leaf wetness with image data to improve prediction under dynamic field conditions. Finally, the review identifies key challenges, research gaps, and future directions concerning dataset construction, environmental variability, structural imbalance, standardization, and multimodal disease monitoring. It provides a foundation for developing next-generation multimodal frameworks for precision agriculture.

Problem

• Plant Disease Detection
• Dataset Imbalance
• Environmental Variability
• Model Generalization
• Precision Agriculture

Innovation

• Plant Disease Datasets
• Data-Centric Taxonomy
• Environmental Variability
• Multi-level Imbalance
• Multimodal Fusion