Multispectral UAV Image Classification of Jimson Weed (Datura stramonium L.) in Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.)

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Jimson weed (Datura stramonium L.) is a toxic weed that is occasionally found in fields with common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) for the processing industry. Common bean growers are required to manually remove toxic weeds. If toxic weed plants remain, the standing crop will be rejected. Hence, the implementation of an automatic weed detection system aiding the farmers is badly needed. The overall goal of this study was to investigate if D. stramonium can be located in common bean fields using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based ten-band multispectral camera. Therefore four objectives were defined: (I) assessing the spectral discriminative capacity between common bean and D. stramonium by the development and application of logistic regression models; (II) examining the influence of ground sampling distance (GSD) on model performance; and improving model generalization by (III) incorporating the use of vegetation indices and cumulative distribution function (CDF) matching and by (IV) combining spectral data from multiple common bean fields with the use of leave-one-group-out cross-validation (LOGO CV). Logistic regression models were created using data from fields at four different locations in Belgium. Based on the results, it was concluded that common bean and D. stramonium are separable based on multispectral information. A model trained and tested on the data of one location obtained a validation true positive rate and true negative rate of 99% and 95%, respectively. In this study, where D. stramonium had a mean plant size of 0.038 m2 (σ = 0.020), a GSD of 2.1 cm was found to be appropriate. However, the results proved to be location dependent as the model was not able to reliably distinguish D. stramonium in two other datasets. Finally, the use of a LOGO CV obtained the best results. Although small D. stramonium plants were still systematically overlooked and classified as common bean, the model was capable of detecting large D. stramonium plants on three of the four fields. This study emphasizes the variability in reflectance data among different common bean fields and the importance of an independent dataset to test model generalization.