An automatic visible-range video weed detection, segmentation and classification prototype in potato field

Weeds might be defined as destructive plants that grow and compete with agricultural crops in order to achieve water and nutrients. Uniform spray of herbicides is nowadays a common cause in crops poisoning, environment pollution and high cost of herbicide consumption. Site-specific spraying is a possible solution for the problems that occur with uniform spray in fields. For this reason, a machine vision prototype is proposed in this study based on video processing and meta-heuristic classifiers for online identification and classification of Marfona potato plant (Solanum tuberosum) and 4299 samples from five weed plant varieties: Malva neglecta (mallow), Portulaca oleracea (purslane), Chenopodium album L (lamb's quarters), Secale cereale L (rye) and Xanthium strumarium (coklebur). In order to properly train the machine vision system, various videos taken from two Marfona potato fields within a surface of six hectares are used. After extraction of texture features based on the gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), color features, spectral descriptors of texture, moment invariants and shape features, six effective discriminant features were selected: the standard deviation of saturation (S) component in HSV color space, difference of first and seventh moment invariants, mean value of hue component (H) in HSI color space, area to length ratio, average blue-difference chrominance (Cb) component in YCbCr color space and standard deviation of in-phase (I) component in YIQ color space. Classification results show a high accuracy of 98% correct classification rate (CCR) over the test set, being able to properly identify potato plant from previously mentioned five different weed varieties. Finally, the machine vision prototype was tested in field under real conditions and was able to properly detect, segment and classify weed from potato plant at a speed of up to 0.15 m/s.