A Survey of Deep Learning Techniques for Weed Detection from Images
Murdoch University（莫道克大学）；Centre for Crop and Food Innovation（作物与食品创新中心）；Food Futures Institute（食品未来研究所）；Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Western Australia（西澳大利亚州初级产业与区域发展部）；Centre for Sustainable Farming Systems（可持续农业系统中心）；Centre of Biosecurity and One Health, Harry Butler Institute（哈里·巴特勒研究所生物安全与同一健康中心）
A S M Mahmudul Hasan, Ferdous Sohel, Dean Diepeveen, Hamid Laga, Michael G. K. Jones
The rapid advances in Deep Learning (DL) techniques have enabled rapid detection, localisation, and recognition of objects from images or videos. DL techniques are now being used in many applications related to agriculture and farming. Automatic detection and classification of weeds can play an important role in weed management and so contribute to higher yields. Weed detection in crops from imagery is inherently a challenging problem because both weeds and crops have similar colours ('green-on-green'), and their shapes and texture can be very similar at the growth phase. Also, a crop in one setting can be considered a weed in another. In addition to their detection, the recognition of specific weed species is essential so that targeted controlling mechanisms (e.g. appropriate herbicides and correct doses) can be applied. In this paper, we review existing deep learning-based weed detection and classification techniques. We cover the detailed literature on four main procedures, i.e., data acquisition, dataset preparation, DL techniques employed for detection, location and classification of weeds in crops, and evaluation metrics approaches. We found that most studies applied supervised learning techniques, they achieved high classification accuracy by fine-tuning pre-trained models on any plant dataset, and past experiments have already achieved high accuracy when a large amount of labelled data is available.
College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University（詹姆斯·库克大学理工学院）
Robotic weed control has seen increased research of late with its potential for boosting productivity in agriculture. Majority of works focus on developing robotics for croplands, ignoring the weed management problems facing rangeland stock farmers. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to widespread uptake of robotic weed control is the robust classification of weed species in their natural environment. The unparalleled successes of deep learning make it an ideal candidate for recognising various weed species in the complex rangeland environment. This work contributes the first large, public, multicl…
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Mississippi State University（密西西比州立大学）；North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）
Precision weed management offers a promising solution for sustainable cropping systems through the use of chemical-reduced/non-chemical robotic weeding techniques, which apply suitable control tactics to individual weeds. Therefore, accurate identification of weed species plays a crucial role in such systems to enable precise, individualized weed treatment. This paper makes a first comprehensive evaluation of deep transfer learning (DTL) for identifying common weeds specific to cotton production systems in southern United States. A new dataset for weed identification was created, consisting of…
University of Lincoln（林肯大学）；Flanders Make（法兰德斯制造研究院）；Ghent University（根特大学）；Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO)（法兰德斯农业、渔业与食品研究所）；Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences（瑞典农业科学大学）
Weed and crop segmentation is becoming an increasingly integral part of precision farming that leverages the current computer vision and deep learning technologies. Research has been extensively carried out based on images captured with a camera from various platforms. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ground-based vehicles including agricultural robots are the two popular platforms for data collection in fields. They all contribute to site-specific weed management (SSWM) to maintain crop yield. Currently, the data from these two platforms is processed separately, though sharing the same sem…
Deep Learning Techniques for In-Crop Weed Identification: A Review
School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机学院）；School of Life and Environmental Sciences, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学生命与环境科学学院）；Australian Centre for Field Robotics, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学澳大利亚田间机器人中心）；College of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University（大连海事大学信息科学技术学院）；College of Mathematics and Computer Science, Wuhan Polytechnic University（武汉轻工大学数学与计算机学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学计算机科学与工程系）；Citrus Research and Education Center, University of Florida（佛罗里达大学柑橘研究与教育中心）
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Mississippi State University（密西西比州立大学）
Weed management plays an important role in many modern agricultural applications. Conventional weed control methods mainly rely on chemical herbicides or hand weeding, which are often cost-ineffective, environmentally unfriendly, or even posing a threat to food safety and human health. Recently, automated/robotic weeding using machine vision systems has seen increased research attention with its potential for precise and individualized weed treatment. However, dedicated, large-scale, and labeled weed image datasets are required to develop robust and effective weed identification systems but th…
Murdoch University（默多克大学）；Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Western Australia（西澳大利亚州初级产业与区域发展部）；University of South Australia（南澳大学）
Most weed species can adversely impact agricultural productivity by competing for nutrients required by high-value crops. Manual weeding is not practical for large cropping areas. Many studies have been undertaken to develop automatic weed management systems for agricultural crops. In this process, one of the major tasks is to recognise the weeds from images. However, weed recognition is a challenging task. It is because weed and crop plants can be similar in colour, texture and shape which can be exacerbated further by the imaging conditions, geographic or weather conditions when the images a…
Weeds are a major threat to crops and are responsible for reducing crop yield worldwide. To mitigate their negative effect, it is advantageous to accurately identify them early in the season to prevent their spread throughout the field. Traditionally, farmers rely on manually scouting fields and applying herbicides for different weeds. However, it is easy to confuse between crops with weeds during the early growth stages. Recently, deep learning-based weed identification has become popular as deep learning relies on convolutional neural networks that are capable of learning important distingui…
University of Orléans（奥尔良大学）；INSA Centre Val de Loire（卢瓦尔河谷国立应用科学学院）
In modern agriculture, usually weeds control consists in spraying herbicides all over the agricultural field. This practice involves significant waste and cost of herbicide for farmers and environmental pollution. One way to reduce the cost and environmental impact is to allocate the right doses of herbicide at the right place and at the right time (Precision Agriculture). Nowadays, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is becoming an interesting acquisition system for weeds localization and management due to its ability to obtain the images of the entire agricultural field with a very high spatial re…
Smart weeding systems to perform plant-specific operations can contribute to the sustainability of agriculture and the environment. Despite monumental advances in autonomous robotic technologies for precision weed management in recent years, work on under-canopy weeding in fields is yet to be realized. A prerequisite of such systems is reliable detection and classification of weeds to avoid mistakenly spraying and, thus, damaging the surrounding plants. Real-time multi-class weed identification enables species-specific treatment of weeds and significantly reduces the amount of herbicide use. H…
Semi-Supervised Weed Detection for Rapid Deployment and Enhanced Efficiency
College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University（詹姆斯库克大学科学与工程学院）；AutoWeed Pty Ltd（AutoWeed私人有限公司）；Agriculture Technology and Adoption Centre, James Cook University（詹姆斯库克大学农业技术与推广中心）
Machine learning has become a major field of research in order to handle more and more complex image detection problems. Among the existing state-of-the-art CNN models, in this paper a region-based, fully convolutional network, for fast and accurate object detection has been proposed based on the experimental results. Among the region based networks, ResNet is regarded as the most recent CNN architecture which has obtained the best results at ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) in 2015. Deep residual networks (ResNets) can make the training process faster and attain more…
Weed scouting is an important part of modern integrated weed management but can be time consuming and sparse when performed manually. Automated weed scouting and weed destruction has typically been performed using classification systems able to classify a set group of species known a priori. This greatly limits deployability as classification systems must be retrained for any field with a different set of weed species present within them. In order to overcome this limitation, this paper works towards developing a clustering approach to weed scouting which can be utilized in any field without t…
To enable robotic weed control, we develop algorithms to detect nutsedge weed from bermudagrass turf. Due to the similarity between the weed and the background turf, manual data labeling is expensive and error-prone. Consequently, directly applying deep learning methods for object detection cannot generate satisfactory results. Building on an instance detection approach (i.e. Mask R-CNN), we combine synthetic data with raw data to train the network. We propose an algorithm to generate high fidelity synthetic data, adopting different levels of annotations to reduce labeling cost. Moreover, we c…
CWD30: A Comprehensive and Holistic Dataset for Crop Weed Recognition in Precision Agriculture
Jeonbuk National University（全北国立大学）；Core Research Institute of Intelligent Robots, Jeonbuk National University（全北国立大学智能机器人核心研究所）；Universitas Udayana（乌达亚纳大学）；Rural Development Administration, National Institute of Crop Science（农村振兴厅国家作物科学研究所）
Over the past decade, unprecedented progress in the development of neural networks influenced dozens of different industries, including weed recognition in the agro-industrial sector. The use of neural networks in agro-industrial activity in the task of recognizing cultivated crops is a new direction. The absence of any standards significantly complicates the understanding of the real situation of the use of the neural network in the agricultural sector. The manuscript presents the complete analysis of researches over the past 10 years on the use of neural networks for the classification and t…
Improved Crop and Weed Detection with Diverse Data Ensemble Learning
University of Regina（里贾纳大学）；King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals（法赫德国王石油与矿业大学）；SDAIA-KFUPM Joint Research Center for Artificial Intelligence（SDAIA-KFUPM人工智能联合研究中心）
Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education（马尼帕尔高等教育学院马尼帕尔理工学院）
Uncontrolled growth of weeds can severely affect the crop yield and quality. Unrestricted use of herbicide for weed removal alters biodiversity and cause environmental pollution. Instead, identifying weed-infested regions can aid selective chemical treatment of these regions. Advances in analyzing farm images have resulted in solutions to identify weed plants. However, a majority of these approaches are based on supervised learning methods which requires huge amount of manually annotated images. As a result, these supervised approaches are economically infeasible for the individual farmer beca…
USU-Corn-WeedDB: A UAV RGB Image Dataset for Multi-Species Weed Detection in Forage Corn
Department of Applied Sciences, Technology, and Education, Utah State University（应用科学、技术和教育系，犹他州立大学）；Department of Plants, Soils & Climate, Utah State University（植物、土壤与气候系，犹他州立大学）；Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Utah State University（土木与环境工程系，犹他州立大学）
From Seedling to Harvest: The GrowingSoy Dataset for Weed Detection in Soy Crops via Instance Segmentation
Universidade Federal de Santa Maria（圣玛丽亚联邦大学）；University of Tsukuba（筑波大学）；Universidad Tecnológica del Uruguay（乌拉圭科技大学）；Wageningen University & Research（瓦赫宁根大学与研究中心）
Improving Lightweight Weed Detection via Knowledge Distillation
University of Hohenheim（霍根海姆大学）；Dept. of Artificial Intelligence in Agricultural Engineering & Computational Science Hub Stuttgart, Germany（农业工程与计算科学人工智能部门，斯图加特研究中心，德国）
University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院）；Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）；Insight Centre for Data Analytics（洞察数据分析中心）
The dairy industry uses clover and grass as fodder for cows. Accurate estimation of grass and clover biomass yield enables smart decisions in optimizing fertilization and seeding density, resulting in increased productivity and positive environmental impact. Grass and clover are usually planted together, since clover is a nitrogen-fixing plant that brings nutrients to the soil. Adjusting the right percentages of clover and grass in a field reduces the need for external fertilization. Existing approaches for estimating the grass-clover composition of a field are expensive and time consuming - r…
Selective weeding is one of the key challenges in the field of agriculture robotics. To accomplish this task, a farm robot should be able to accurately detect plants and to distinguish them between crop and weeds. Most of the promising state-of-the-art approaches make use of appearance-based models trained on large annotated datasets. Unfortunately, creating large agricultural datasets with pixel-level annotations is an extremely time consuming task, actually penalizing the usage of data-driven techniques. In this paper, we face this problem by proposing a novel and effective approach that aim…
Weed Detection in Challenging Field Conditions: A Semi-Supervised Framework for Overcoming Shadow Bias and Data Scarcity
College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University（詹姆斯库克大学科学与工程学院）；Agriculture Technology and Adoption Centre, James Cook University（詹姆斯库克大学农业技术与采纳中心）；ARC Training Centre in Plant Biosecurity（植物生物安全培训中心）
INSA CVL（INSA中央卢瓦尔河谷校区）；University of Orleans（奥尔良大学）；PRISME EA 4229（PRISME EA 4229研究所）
Crop and weed monitoring is an important challenge for agriculture and food production nowadays. Thanks to recent advances in data acquisition and computation technologies, agriculture is evolving to a more smart and precision farming to meet with the high yield and high quality crop production. Classification and recognition in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) images are important phases for crop monitoring. Advances in deep learning models relying on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) have achieved high performances in image classification in the agricultural domain. Despite the success of thi…
Agriculture is vital for human survival and remains a major driver of several economies around the world; more so in underdeveloped and developing economies. With increasing demand for food and cash crops, due to a growing global population and the challenges posed by climate change, there is a pressing need to increase farm outputs while incurring minimal costs. Previous machine vision technologies developed for selective weeding have faced the challenge of reliable and accurate weed detection. We present approaches for plant seedlings classification with a dataset that contains 4,275 images …
Resource-Constrained UAV-Based Weed Detection for Site-Specific Management on Edge Devices
Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS, USA（农业与生物工程系，密苏里州立大学）；Sustainable Agriculture Research Unit, Mississippi State, MS, USA（可持续农业研究单位，密苏里州）；Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS, USA（植物与土壤科学系，密苏里州立大学）；Biosystems Engineering, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, USA（生物系统工程系，北达科塔州立大学）；NDSU Peltier Institute for the Advancement of Agricultural Technology, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, USA（NDSU裴特里农业技术进步研究所，北达科塔州立大学）
Robotic System with AI for Real Time Weed Detection, Canopy Aware Spraying, and Droplet Pattern Evaluation
Machine Vision and Optical Sensor (MVOS) Lab, Dept. of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD, USA（机械视觉与光学传感器实验室，农业与生物系统工程系，南达科他州立大学，布鲁金斯，SD，USA）；Department of Agronomy, Horticulture and Plant Science, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD, USA（园艺、园艺学与植物科学系，南达科他州立大学，布鲁金斯，SD，USA）
本研究开发了一种基于AI的机器人喷洒系统，利用YOLO11模型在Jetson Orin Nano上实时检测杂草和冠层，动态调整喷嘴，实现精准除草剂施用，减少成本与污染。
Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAV) are a promising technology for smart farming related applications. Aerial monitoring of agriculture farms with UAV enables key decision-making pertaining to crop monitoring. Advancements in deep learning techniques have further enhanced the precision and reliability of aerial imagery based analysis. The capabilities to mount various kinds of sensors (RGB, spectral cameras) on UAV allows remote crop analysis applications such as vegetation classification and segmentation, crop counting, yield monitoring and prediction, crop mapping, weed detection, disease and nut…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are used in precision agriculture (PA) to enable aerial monitoring of farmlands. Intelligent methods are required to pinpoint weed infestations and make optimal choice of pesticide. UAV can fly a multispectral camera and collect data. However, the classification of multispectral images using supervised machine learning algorithms such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) requires large amount of training data. This is a common drawback in deep learning we try to circumvent making use of a semi-supervised generative adversarial networks (GAN), providing a pixel-…
Computer Engineering Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM)（计算机工程系，国王法赫德石油与矿物大学）；SDAIA-KFUPM Joint Research Center on Artificial Intelligence, IRC for Intelligent Secure Systems and Department of Computer Engineering, KFUPM（SDAIA-KFUPM人工智能联合研究中心，智能安全系统研究院及计算机工程系，KFUPM）；Center for Intelligent Secure Systems and the Department of Computer Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals（智能安全系统中心及计算机工程系，国王法赫德石油与矿物大学）；Research Chair of Pervasive and Mobile Computing, Department of Software Engineering, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University（普及与移动计算研究主席，软件工程系，计算机与信息科学学院，国王沙特大学）
本文提出TinyEcoWeedNet，通过结构化剪枝、量化感知训练和TensorRT加速，在Jetson Orin Nano上实现184 FPS实时杂草检测，模型缩小68.5%，并在CottonWeedDet12上以85.9% mAP50超越YOLO11n和YOLO12n。
In agriculture, the majority of vision systems perform still image classification. Yet, recent work has highlighted the potential of spatial and temporal cues as a rich source of information to improve the classification performance. In this paper, we propose novel approaches to explicitly capture both spatial and temporal information to improve the classification of deep convolutional neural networks. We leverage available RGB-D images and robot odometry to perform inter-frame feature map spatial registration. This information is then fused within recurrent deep learnt models, to improve thei…
North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）；Colaberry Inc（Colaberry公司）；Iowa State University（爱荷华州立大学）
Severe weather events can cause large financial losses to farmers. Detailed information on the location and severity of damage will assist farmers, insurance companies, and disaster response agencies in making wise post-damage decisions. The goal of this study was a proof-of-concept to detect damaged crop areas from aerial imagery using computer vision and deep learning techniques. A specific objective was to compare existing object detection algorithms to determine which was best suited for crop damage detection. Two modes of crop damage common in maize (corn) production were simulated: stalk…
Agricultural robots are expected to increase yields in a sustainable way and automate precision tasks, such as weeding and plant monitoring. At the same time, they move in a continuously changing, semi-structured field environment, in which features can hardly be found and reproduced at a later time. Challenges for Lidar and visual detection systems stem from the fact that plants can be very small, overlapping and have a steadily changing appearance. Therefore, a popular way to localize vehicles with high accuracy is based on ex- pensive global navigation satellite systems and not on natural l…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）
The development of practical applications, such as autonomous driving and robotics, has brought increasing attention to 3D point cloud understanding. While deep learning has achieved remarkable success on image-based tasks, there are many unique challenges faced by deep neural networks in processing massive, unstructured and noisy 3D points. To demonstrate the latest progress of deep learning for 3D point cloud understanding, this paper summarizes recent remarkable research contributions in this area from several different directions (classification, segmentation, detection, tracking, flow est…
Deep learning models have been successfully deployed for a diverse array of image-based plant phenotyping applications including disease detection and classification. However, successful deployment of supervised deep learning models requires large amount of labeled data, which is a significant challenge in plant science (and most biological) domains due to the inherent complexity. Specifically, data annotation is costly, laborious, time consuming and needs domain expertise for phenotyping tasks, especially for diseases. To overcome this challenge, active learning algorithms have been proposed …
