Weeds Detection and Classification using Convolutional Long-Short-Term Memory

Abstract The smart agricultural robotic system can decrease the dependence on various traditional agriculture crop spraying methods such as pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer. To meet the world population food requirements, conventional schemes are not sufficient for spraying agrochemicals to control the weeds and increase crop production. Therefore, a smart and intelligent farming system is introduced to increase the production of crops and to reach crop production target. In this paper, Deep Learning (DL) based algorithms is applied for the identification and classification of weed plants using combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long-Short- Term Memory (LSTM). Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) has a unique structure to get discriminative features for the input images, and LSTM allows to jointly optimize the classification. To validate the proposed scheme, nine kinds of weeds are classified using the proposed method such as vine weeds, three-leaf weeds, spiky weeds, and invasive creeping weeds. We carried out several extensive experiments and 99.36% of average classification accuracy is achieved. The obtained results show that the combination of CCN-LSTM has significantly higher classification capabilities in comparison to other existing prominent approaches.