Monitoring of pea crops with neural network processing of images obtained using UAVs
https://doi.org/10.32634/0869-8155-2025-397-08-122-128
Abstract
The article is devoted to the development and testing of technology for recognizing pea sprouts and estimating its biomass based on images from UAVs using neural networks. Rocket peas were sown by the “Kuzbass” sowing complex in the Topkinsky district of the Kemerovo Region on an area of 21.55 hectares. The soil type is slightly leached chernozem. The predecessor is spring wheat. The seed depth is 6 cm, the seeding rate is 1.1 million seeds per 1 hectare. Aerial photography was performed three weeks later with a quadcopter with a 20MP camera resolution from a flight altitude of 3 m. The shooting was carried out in two stages — in the early morning in cloudy conditions to obtain images of pea shoots without shadows and in the daytime with shadows from sprouts and weeds. As a result, two sets of 120 source photos were generated to train the neural network. Based on the obtained datasets, the Ultralytics YOLOv8 neural network model was trained. Testing of the obtained models was performed in a Python program for batch image processing and counting the number of plants in each image. The accuracy of recognizing sprouts on the first dataset was 97.3%, on the second — 67.3%. This is due to the different shooting conditions. Combining the two datasets allowed for a recognition accuracy of 94.7%. This is slightly lower than the first option, but much closer to the actual conditions of aerial photography. The result of the work is a program that allows batch image processing for automatic counting of pea sprouts and calculating their area in the images.
About the Authors
D. E. FedorovRussian Federation
Dmitry Evgenievich Fedorov, Candidate of Technical Sciences
5 Markovtsev Str., Kemerovo, 650056
S. N. Bykov
Russian Federation
Sergey Nikolaevich Bykov, Candidate of Technical Sciences
5 Markovtsev Str., Kemerovo, 650056
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Review
For citations:
Fedorov D.E., Bykov S.N. Monitoring of pea crops with neural network processing of images obtained using UAVs. Agrarian science. 2025;(8):122-128. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.32634/0869-8155-2025-397-08-122-128