Paddy Crop and Weed Discrimination: A Multiple Classifier System Approach

Weeds are unwanted plants that grow among crops. These weeds can significantly reduce the yield and quality of the farm output. Unfortunately, site-specific weed management is not followed in most of the cases. That is, instead of treating a field with a specific type of herbicide, the field is treated with a broadcast herbicide application. This broadcast application of the herbicide has resulted in herbicide-resistant weeds and has many ill effects on the natural environment. This has prompted many research studies to seek the most effective weed management techniques. One such technique is computer vision-based automatic weed detection and identification. Using this technique, weeds can be detected and identified and a suitable herbicide can be recommended to the farmers. Therefore, it is important for the computer vision technique to successfully identify and classify the crops and weeds from the digital images. This paper investigates the multiple classifier systems built using support vector machines and random forest classifiers for plant classification in classifying paddy crops and weeds from digital images. Digital images of paddy crops and weeds from the paddy fields were acquired using three different cameras fixed at different heights from the ground. Texture, color, and shape features were extracted from the digital images after background subtraction and used for classification. A simple and new method was used as a decision function in the multiple classifier systems. An accuracy of 91.36% was obtained by the multiple classifier systems and was found to outperform single classifier systems.