An Instance Segmentation-Based Method to Obtain the Leaf Age and Plant Centre of Weeds in Complex Field Environments

• Main Authors: Longzhe Quan, Bing Wu, Shouren Mao, Chunjie Yang, Hengda Li
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-05-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: weeds; phenotype; deep learning; image segmentation
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/10/3389

Leaf age and plant centre are important phenotypic information of weeds, and accurate identification of them plays an important role in understanding the morphological structure of weeds, guiding precise targeted spraying and reducing the use of herbicides. In this work, a weed segmentation method based on BlendMask is proposed to obtain the phenotypic information of weeds under complex field conditions. This study collected images from different angles (front, side, and top views) of three kinds of weeds (<i>Solanum nigrum</i>, barnyard grass (<i>Echinochloa crus-galli</i>), and <i>Abutilon theophrasti</i> Medicus) in a maize field. Two datasets (with and without data enhancement) and two backbone networks (ResNet50 and ResNet101) were replaced to improve model performance. Finally, seven evaluation indicators are used to evaluate the segmentation results of the model under different angles. The results indicated that data enhancement and ResNet101 as the backbone network could enhance the model performance. The <i>F</i>₁ value of the plant centre is 0.9330, and the recognition accuracy of leaf age can reach 0.957. The <i>mIOU</i> value of the top view is 0.642. Therefore, deep learning methods can effectively identify weed leaf age and plant centre, which is of great significance for variable spraying.