Plant stress recognition has witnessed significant improvements in recent years with the advent of deep learning. A large-scale and annotated training dataset is required to achieve decent performance; however, collecting it is frequently difficult and expensive. Therefore, deploying current deep learning-based methods in real-world applications may suffer primarily from limited and imperfect data. Embracing them is a promising strategy that has not received sufficient attention. From this perspective, a systematic survey was conducted in this study, with the ultimate objective of monitoring plant growth by implementing deep learning, which frees humans and potentially reduces the resultant losses from plant stress. We believe that our paper has highlighted the importance of embracing this limited and imperfect data and enhanced its relevant understanding.