Dicotyledon Weed Quantification Algorithm for Selective Herbicide Application in Maize Crops.

The stricter legislation within the European Union for the regulation of herbicides that are prone to leaching causes a greater economic burden on the agricultural industry through taxation. Owing to the increased economic burden, research in reducing herbicide usage has been prompted. High-resolution images from digital cameras support the studying of plant characteristics. These images can also be utilized to analyze shape and texture characteristics for weed identification. Instead of detecting weed patches, weed density can be estimated at a sub-patch level, through which even the identification of a single plant is possible. The aim of this study is to adapt the monocot and dicot coverage ratio vision (MoDiCoVi) algorithm to estimate dicotyledon leaf cover, perform grid spraying in real time, and present initial results in terms of potential herbicide savings in maize. The authors designed and executed an automated, large-scale field trial supported by the Armadillo autonomous tool carrier robot. The field trial consisted of 299 maize plots. Half of the plots (parcels) were planned with additional seeded weeds; the other half were planned with naturally occurring weeds. The in-situ evaluation showed that, compared to conventional broadcast spraying, the proposed method can reduce herbicide usage by 65% without measurable loss in biological effect.

Seedling discrimination with shape features derived from a distance transform.

The aim of this research is an improvement of plant seedling recognition by two new approaches of shape feature generation based on plant silhouettes. Experiments show that the proposed feature sets possess value in plant recognition when compared with other feature sets. Both methods approximate a distance distribution of an object, either by resampling or by approximation of the distribution with a high degree Legendre polynomial. In the latter case, the polynomial coefficients constitute a feature set. The methods have been tested through a discrimination process where two similar plant species are to be distinguished into their respective classes. The used performance assessment is based on the classification accuracy of 4 different classifiers (a k-Nearest Neighbor, Naive-Bayes, Linear Support Vector Machine, Nonlinear Support Vector Machine). Another set of 21 well-known shape features described in the literature is used for comparison. The used data consisted of 139 samples of cornflower (Centaura cyanus L.) and 63 samples of nightshade (Solanum nigrum L.). The highest discrimination accuracy was achieved with the Legendre Polynomial feature set and amounted to 97.5%. This feature set consisted of 10 numerical values. Another feature set consisting of 21 common features achieved an accuracy of 92.5%. The results suggest that the Legendre Polynomial feature set can compete with or outperform the commonly used feature sets.