Field weed classification based on modified LBP and local sparse representation

Accurately identifying field weeds is crucial for selecting appropriate agricultural machinery and herbicides. This paper focuses on nine common weed species during the seedling stage in natural backgrounds of field vegetables, proposing a novel weed foreground segmentation method based on image processing and a new weed classification model using sparse representation classification (K_SRC). Initially, K-means clustering and threshold segmentation are applied to the a component of Lab color space to obtain binary weed images, followed by area filtering to remove interference. The binary weed image is then masked with the original image to extract clean weed images. Color features and mLBP texture features are extracted from segmented weed images to form a training sample set. KNN computes a local dictionary, and sparse coefficients are calculated using the OMP algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate a classification accuracy of 95.22% compared to four other algorithms. Additionally, this research provides new insights into the application of sparse representation in agriculture.