LE3 .A278 2020

2020

Chipman, Hugh
McIntyre, Andrew

Acadia University

Master of Science

Honours

Mathematics and Statistics

Mathematics & Statistics

This study applies deep learning neural networks to the problem of identifying crop and weed stem origin points in images. An autonomous weeding robot drives through a field, taking overhead images as it drives over the crop row. A sample of images, with weed and crop labels added by an operator, is used to train a neural network. The trained neural network determines the locations of weed stem emergence points, then a mechanical picking arm travels to the location of the weed and pulls it from the ground. The sequential nature of the image data over time raises the question of whether learning sequential features in addition to local features of the data could improve weed classification. This thesis offers an investigation into the utility of convolutional long short-term memory layers for classifying crop and weed stem origins from a sequence of two images and introduces a novel weed/crop confusion matrix for evaluating model performance.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:3548