A Novel Angular Texture Pattern (ATP) Extraction Method for Crop and Weed Discrimination Using Curvelet Transformation

Abstract

Weed management is the most significant process in the agricultural applications to improve the crop productivity rate and reduce the herbicide application cost. Existing weed detection techniques does not yield better performance due to the complex background and illumination variation. Hence, there arises a need for the development of effective weed identification technique. To overcome this drawback, this paper proposes a novel Angular Texture Pattern (ATP) Extraction Method for crop and weed discrimination using curvelet transformation. In our proposed work, Adaptive Median Filter (AMF) is used for filtering the impulse noise from the image. Plant image identification is performed using green pixel extraction and K-means clustering. Wrapping based Curvelet transform is applied to the plant image. Feature extraction is performed to extract the angular texture pattern of the plant image. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based Differential Evolution Feature Selection (DEFS) approach is applied to select the optimal features. Then, the selected features are learned and passed through an RVM based classifier to find out the weed. Edge detection and contouring is performed to identify the weed in the plant image. Fuzzy rule-based approach is applied to detect the low, medium and high levels of the weed patchiness. From the experimental results, it is clearly observed that the accuracy of the proposed approach is higher than the existing Support Vector Machine (SVM) based approaches. The proposed approach achieves better performance in terms of Hausdorff distance, Jaccard distance, Dice distance, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.