A comprehensive review on recent applications of unmanned aerial vehicle remote sensing with various sensors for high-throughput plant phenotyping

High-throughput phenotyping has been widely studied in plant science to monitor plant growth and analyze the influence of genotypes and environment on plant growth. To meet the demand of large-scale high-throughput phenotyping, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been developed for near-ground remote sensing. UAVs based remote sensing has been used for high-throughput phenotyping of various traits of plants. This review focused on the applications of UAVs based remote sensing of different traits with different phenotyping sensors. In this review, the UAVs platforms and the phenotyping sensors were briefly introduced. The applications of UAVs to obtain and analyze plant phenotype traits were introduced and summarized by the traits in a more comprehensive way. A comparison of different phenotyping sensors was conducted. Furthermore, the challenges and future prospects of phenotype information acquisition and data analysis using UAVs as remote sensing platforms were also discussed. Since the current studies from various countries and researchers were fragmented to just explore the feasibility of UAVs based high-throughput phenotyping, this review aimed to provide the researchers and readers the current applications of UAVs for high-throughput phenotyping and how the studies were conducted, provide guidelines for future studies.