Review of Machine-Vision-Based Plant Detection Technologies for Robotic Weeding

Controlling weeds with reduced reliance on herbicides is one of the main challenges to move toward a more sustainable agriculture. Robotic weeding is a thought to be a viable way to reduce the environmental loading of agrochemicals while keeping the operation efficiency high. One of the key technologies for performing robotic weeding is automatic detection of crops and weeds in fields. This paper presents an overview on various methods for detecting plants based on machine vision, mainly concentrating on two main challenges: dealing with changing light and crop/weed discrimination. To overcome the first challenge, both physical and algorithmic methods have been proposed. Physical methods can result in a more cumbersome machine while algorithmic methods are less robust. For crop/weed discrimination, deep-learning-based methods have shown obvious advantages over traditional methods based on hand-crafted features. However, traditional methods still hold some merits that can be leveraged to deep-learning-based methods. With the fast development of hardware technologies, researchers should take full advantage of advanced hardware to ease the algorithm design. In the future, the identification of crops and weeds can be more accurate and fine-grained with the support of online databases and computing resources based on the advances in artificial intelligence and communication technologies.