Appropriate Site Specific Weed Management (SSWM) is crucial to ensure the crop yields. Within SSWM of large-scale area, remote sensing is a key technology to provide accurate weed distribution information. Compared with satellite and piloted aircraft remote sensing, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is capable of capturing high spatial resolution imagery, which will provide more detailed information for weed mapping. The objective of this paper is to generate an accurate weed cover map based on UAV imagery. The UAV RGB imagery was collected in 2017 October over the rice field located in South China. The Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) method was proposed for weed mapping of the collected imagery. Transfer learning was used to improve generalization capability, and skip architecture was applied to increase the prediction accuracy. After that, the performance of FCN architecture was compared with Patch_based CNN algorithm and Pixel_based CNN method. Experimental results showed that our FCN method outperformed others, both in terms of accuracy and efficiency. The overall accuracy of the FCN approach was up to 0.935 and the accuracy for weed recognition was 0.883, which means that this algorithm is capable of generating accurate weed cover maps for the evaluated UAV imagery.

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Weed control is necessary in rice cultivation, but the excessive use of herbicide treatments has led to serious agronomic and environmental problems. Suitable site-specific weed management (SSWM) is a solution to address this problem while maintaining the rice production quality and quantity. In the context of SSWM, an accurate weed distribution map is needed to provide decision support information for herbicide treatment. UAV remote sensing offers an efficient and effective platform to monitor weeds thanks to its high spatial resolution. In this work, UAV imagery was captured in a rice field located in South China. A semantic labeling approach was adopted to generate the weed distribution maps of the UAV imagery. An ImageNet pre-trained CNN with residual framework was adapted in a fully convolutional form, and transferred to our dataset by fine-tuning. Atrous convolution was applied to extend the field of view of convolutional filters; the performance of multi-scale processing was evaluated; and a fully connected conditional random field (CRF) was applied after the CNN to further refine the spatial details. Finally, our approach was compared with the pixel-based-SVM and the classical FCN-8s. Experimental results demonstrated that our approach achieved the best performance in terms of accuracy. Especially for the detection of small weed patches in the imagery, our approach significantly outperformed other methods. The mean intersection over union (mean IU), overall accuracy, and Kappa coefficient of our method were 0.7751, 0.9445, and 0.9128, respectively. The experiments showed that our approach has high potential in accurate weed mapping of UAV imagery.

Chemical control is necessary in order to control weed infestation and to ensure a rice yield. However, excessive use of herbicides has caused serious agronomic and environmental problems. Site specific weed management (SSWM) recommends an appropriate dose of herbicides according to the weed coverage, which may reduce the use of herbicides while enhancing their chemical effects. In the context of SSWM, the weed cover map and prescription map must be generated in order to carry out the accurate spraying. In this paper, high resolution unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery were captured over a rice field. Different workflows were evaluated to generate the weed cover map for the whole field. Fully convolutional networks (FCN) was applied for a pixel-level classification. Theoretical analysis and practical evaluation were carried out to seek for an architecture improvement and performance boost. A chessboard segmentation process was used to build the grid framework of the prescription map. The experimental results showed that the overall accuracy and mean intersection over union (mean IU) for weed mapping using FCN-4s were 0.9196 and 0.8473, and the total time (including the data collection and data processing) required to generate the weed cover map for the entire field (50 × 60 m) was less than half an hour. Different weed thresholds (0.00–0.25, with an interval of 0.05) were used for the prescription map generation. High accuracies (above 0.94) were observed for all of the threshold values, and the relevant herbicide saving ranged from 58.3% to 70.8%. All of the experimental results demonstrated that the method used in this work has the potential to produce an accurate weed cover map and prescription map in SSWM applications.

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The timely and efficient generation of weed maps is essential for weed control tasks and precise spraying applications. Based on the general concept of site-specific weed management (SSWM), many researchers have used unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing technology to monitor weed distributions, which can provide decision support information for precision spraying. However, image processing is mainly conducted offline, as the time gap between image collection and spraying significantly limits the applications of SSWM. In this study, we conducted real-time image processing onboard a UAV to reduce the time gap between image collection and herbicide treatment. First, we established a hardware environment for real-time image processing that integrates map visualization, flight control, image collection, and real-time image processing onboard a UAV based on secondary development. Second, we exploited the proposed model design to develop a lightweight network architecture for weed mapping tasks. The proposed network architecture was evaluated and compared with mainstream semantic segmentation models. Results demonstrate that the proposed network outperform contemporary networks in terms of efficiency with competitive accuracy. We also conducted optimization during the inference process. Precision calibration was applied to both the desktop and embedded devices and the precision was reduced from FP32 to FP16. Experimental results demonstrate that this precision calibration further improves inference speed while maintaining reasonable accuracy. Our modified network architecture achieved an accuracy of 80.9% on the testing samples and its inference speed was 4.5 fps on a Jetson TX2 module (Nvidia Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA), which demonstrates its potential for practical agricultural monitoring and precise spraying applications.