Automatic expert system for weeds/crops identification in images from maize fields

Automation for the identification of plants, based on imaging sensors, in agricultural crops represents an important challenge. In maize fields, site-specific treatments, with chemical products or mechanical manipulations, can be applied for weeds elimination. This requires the identification of weeds and crop plants. Sometimes these plants appear impregnated by materials coming from the soil (particularly clays). This appears when the field is irrigated or after rain, particularly when the water falls with some force. This makes traditional approaches based on images greenness identification fail under such situations. Indeed, most pixels belonging to plants, but impregnated, are misidentified as soil pixels because they have lost their natural greenness. This loss of greenness also occurs after treatment when weeds have begun the process of death. To correctly identify all plants, independently of the loss of greenness, we design an automatic expert system based on image segmentation procedures. The performance of this method is verified favorably. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.