Soybean field weed recognition based on light sum-product networks and UAV remote sensing images

Abstract: In weed control, using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to obtain images, spraying specific pesticides according to different weed communities is an effective means of prevention and control. Sum-product networks is suitable for small embedded devices such as UAV. But it has many parameters, long training time, and more redundant nodes and subtrees in the image classification task, so that the recognition accuracy is not high. In response to these problems, this paper improved the learning process of traditional sum-product networks and used a mini-batch learning method to construct a network model through one pass of data. Its lightweight structure required less hardware resources and was more suitable for small embedded devices such as drones. It had reference significance for the subsequent spraying of pesticides by drones. For the input image, the light sum-product networks weed recognition model first used K-means clustering as the low-level feature extractor to obtain the feature dictionary, then downsampled the extracted features, and took the sampling features into mini-batches of data as input to train the light sum-product networks. Each category corresponds to an independent network structure, and the high-level features were extracted by internal nodes in the network structure. The probability values of the corresponding categories were output by the root nodes to identify weeds. The network structure was updated by comparing the correlation coefficients between variables. Bayesian moment matching was used to update the network parameters. To simplify the structure, when a product node had only one child, it was removed from the network, and its child nodes were connected to its parent node. Similarly, if a sum node was the last node of another sum node, then the child node was deleted and all its child nodes were promoted one layer up. This effectively reduced redundant edge branches and made the model structure lighter. Using this method, the average classification accuracy of soybean seedlings, grass weeds, broadleaf weeds and soils in UAV images was 99.5%, and the average sensitivity was 99.6%. And the model parameter quantity was only 33% of the traditional sum-product networks. The parameter quantity would increase with the input of the data flow. The amount of parameters was still much smaller than traditional convolutional neural networks AlexNet when using the larger data sets to construct the light sum-product networks. It showed that the model was suitable for larger data sets. The memory usage was reduced by 549 M compared to the traditional sum-product networks and was reduced by 1 072 M compared to the convolutional neural networks. The maximum average training time was reduced by 688.79 s compared to the traditional sum-product networks, which was much less than the convolutional neural networks. The experimental results showed that using the light sum-product network as the weed recognition model, the model parameters were less, the memory requirements were lower, and the training time was shorter without loss of precision. The shortcoming was that the data acquired by the UAV image in the previous stage needed to be processed in multiple steps. The data set itself relied on manual classification. Some images had different categories of overlap, and the misclassification of such images would increase when the features were extracted. However, by adjusting the classification threshold, the overall classification can achieve the desired results. The research can provide a reference for the use of light sum-product networks in weed recognition of UAV spraying pesticides.