Aerial Imagery Paddy Seedlings Inspection Using Deep Learning

In recent years complex food security issues caused by climatic changes, limitations in human labour, and increasing production costs require a strategic approach in addressing problems. The emergence of artificial intelligence due to the capability of recent advances in computing architectures could become a new alternative to existing solutions. Deep learning algorithms in computer vision for image classification and object detection can facilitate the agriculture industry, especially in paddy cultivation, to alleviate human efforts in laborious, burdensome, and repetitive tasks. Optimal planting density is a crucial factor for paddy cultivation as it will influence the quality and quantity of production. There have been several studies involving planting density using computer vision and remote sensing approaches. While most of the studies have shown promising results, they have disadvantages and show room for improvement. One of the disadvantages is that the studies aim to detect and count all the paddy seedlings to determine planting density. The defective paddy seedlings' locations are not pointed out to help farmers during the sowing process. In this work we aimed to explore several deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) models to determine which one performs the best for defective paddy seedling detection using aerial imagery. Thus, we evaluated the accuracy, robustness, and inference latency of one- and two-stage pretrained object detectors combined with state-of-the-art feature extractors such as EfficientNet, ResNet50, and MobilenetV2 as a backbone. We also investigated the effect of transfer learning with fine-tuning on the performance of the aforementioned pretrained models. Experimental results showed that our proposed methods were capable of detecting the defective paddy rice seedlings with the highest precision and an F1-Score of 0.83 and 0.77, respectively, using a one-stage pretrained object detector called EfficientDet-D1 EficientNet.