Deep Learning for Weeds’ Growth Point Detection based on U-Net

Weeds bring disadvantages to crops since they can damage them, and a clean treatment with less pollution and contamination should be developed. Artificial intelligence gives new hope to agriculture to achieve smart farming. This study delivers an automated weeds growth point detection using deep learning. This study proposes a combination of semantic graphics for generating data annotation and U-Net with pre-trained deep learning as a backbone for locating the growth point of the weeds on the given field scene. The dataset was collected from an actual field. We measured the intersection over union, f1-score, precision, and recall to evaluate our method. Moreover, Mobilenet V2 was chosen as the backbone and compared with Resnet 34. The results showed that the proposed method was accurate enough to detect the growth point and handle the brightness variation. The best performance was achieved by Mobilenet V2 as a backbone with IoU 96.81%, precision 97.77%, recall 98.97%, and f1-score 97.30%.