Crop Identification and Growth Stage Determination for Autonomous Navigation of Agricultural Robots

This study introduces two methods for crop identification and growth stage determination, focused primarily on enabling mobile robot navigation. These methods include a two-phase approach involving separate models for crop and growth stage identification and a one-phase method employing a single mod...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Cortinas, Eloisa, Emmi, Luis Alfredo, González-de-Santos, Pablo
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/340218
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/340218
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Object detection
Precision agriculture
Agricultural robots
Crop identification
Descripción
Sumario:This study introduces two methods for crop identification and growth stage determination, focused primarily on enabling mobile robot navigation. These methods include a two-phase approach involving separate models for crop and growth stage identification and a one-phase method employing a single model capable of handling all crops and growth stages. The methods were validated with maize and sugar beet field images, demonstrating the effectiveness of both approaches. The one-phase approach proved to be advantageous for scenarios with a limited variety of crops, allowing, with a single model, to recognize both the type and growth state of the crop and showed an overall Mean Average Precision (mAP) of about 67.50%. Moreover, the two-phase method recognized the crop type first, achieving an overall mAP of about 74.2%, with maize detection performing exceptionally well at 77.6%. However, when it came to identifying the specific maize growth state, the mAP was only able to reach 61.3% due to some difficulties arising when accurately categorizing maize growth stages with six and eight leaves. On the other hand, the two-phase approach has been proven to be more flexible and scalable, making it a better choice for systems accommodating a wide range of crops