A customized convolutional neural network-based approach for weeds identification in cotton crops

Smart farming is a hot research area for experts globally to fulfill the soaring demand for food. Automated approaches, based on convolutional neural networks (CNN), for crop disease identification, weed classification, and monitoring have substantially helped increase crop yields. Plant diseases and pests are posing a significant danger to the health of plants, thus causing a reduction in crop production. The cotton crop, is a major cash crop in Asian and African countries and is affected by different types of weeds leading to reduced yield. Weeds infestation starts with the germination of the crop, due to which diseases also invade the field. Therefore, proper monitoring of the cotton crop throughout the entire phases of crop development from sewing to ripening and reaping is extremely significant to identify the harmful and undesired weeds timely and efficiently so that proper measures can be taken to eradicate them. Most of the weeds and pests attack cotton plants at different stages of growth. Therefore, timely identification and classification of such weeds on virtue of their symptoms, apparent similarities, and effects can reduce the risk of yield loss. Weeds and pest infestation can be controlled through advanced digital gadgets like sensors and cameras which can provide a bulk of data to work with. Yet efficient management of this extraordinarily bulging agriculture data is a cardinal challenge for deep learning techniques too. In the given study, an approach based on deep CNN-based architecture is presented. This work covers identifying and classifying the cotton weeds efficiently alongside a comparison of other already existing CNN models like VGG-16, ResNet, DenseNet, and Xception Model. Experimental results indicate the accuracy of VGG-16, ResNet-101, DenseNet-121, XceptionNet as 95.4%, 97.1%, 96.9% and 96.1%, respectively. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 98.3% outperforming other models.