Effective Vision-based Classification for Separating Sugar Beets and Weeds for Precision Farming

Using robots in precision farming has the potential to reduce the reliance on herbicides and pesticides through selectively spraying individual plants or through manual weed removal. A prerequisite for that is the ability of the robot to separate and identify the value crops and the weeds on the field. Based on the output of the robot’s perception system, it can trigger the actuators for spraying or removal. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting the sugar beet plants as well as weeds using a camera installed on a mobile field robot. We propose a system that performs vegetation detection, local as well as object-based feature extraction, random forest classification, and smoothing through a Markov random field to obtain an accurate estimate of the crops and weeds. We implemented and thoroughly evaluated our system on a real farm robot on different sugar beet fields and illustrate that our approach allows for accurately identifying the weed on the field.