Comparison of Plant Detection Performance of CNN-based Single-stage and Two-stage Models for Precision Agriculture

Abstract

The fact that arable land is not increasing in proportion to the ever-increasing population will increase the need for food in the coming years. For this reason, it is necessary to increase the yield of crops to make optimum use of arable land. One of the most important reasons for the decrease in yield and quality of crops is weeds. Herbicides are generally preferred for weed management. Due to deficiencies in herbicide application methods, only 0.015-6% of herbicides reach their target. The use of herbicides, which is an important part of the agricultural system, is an issue that needs to be emphasized, considering the risk of residue and environmental damage. In parallel with the rapid development of electronic and computer technologies, artificial intelligence applications have had the opportunity to develop. In this context, the use of artificial intelligence for plant detection in the subsystems of herbicide application machines will contribute to the development of precision agriculture techniques. In this study, the plant detection performances of single-stage and two-stage Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based deep learning (DL) models are evaluated. In this context, a dataset was created by taking images of Zea mays, Rhaponticum repens (L.) Hidalgo, and Chenopodium album L. plants in agricultural lands in Konya. With this dataset, the training of the models was carried out by the transfer learning method. The evaluation metrics of the trained models were calculated using the error matrix. In addition, training time and prediction time were used as quantitative metrics in the evaluation of the models. The plant detection performance, training time, and prediction time of the models were 85%, 8 h, 1.21 s for SSD MobileNet v2 and 99%, 22 h, 2.32 s for Faster R-CNN Inception v2, respectively. According to these results, Faster R-CNN Inception v2 is outperform in terms of accuracy. However, in cases where training time and prediction time are important, the SSD MobileNet v2 model can be trained with more data to increase its accuracy.

Keywords

• Precision Agriculture
• Plant Detection
• SSD
• Faster R-CNN
• Performance Evaluation