Automated weed and crop recognition and classification model using deep transfer learning with optimization algorithm.
Journal:
Scientific reports
Published Date:
Aug 10, 2025
Abstract
Weeds and crops contribute to a endless resistance for similar assets, which leads to potential declines in crop production and enlarged agricultural expenses. Conventional models of weed control like extensive pesticide use, appear with the hassle of environmental pollution and advancing weed battle. As the need for organic agricultural and pollutant-free products increases, there is a crucial need for revolutionary solutions. The rise of smart agricultural tools, containing satellite technology, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), and intelligent robots certifies to be paramount in dealing with weed-related challenges. Deep learning (DL) based object detection model has been carried out in numerous applications. As a result, need for instance-level analyses of the weed dataset places constraints on the significance of influential DL methods. Artificial intelligence (AI) led image analysis for weed recognition and mainly, machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) utilizing images from cultivated lands have commonly been employed in the literature for identifying numerous kinds of weeds that are cultivated beside crops. This method develops an Automated Weed Recognition and Classification using a Deep Learning Model with Lemrus Optimization (AWRC-DLMLO). The main purpose of the AWRC-DLMLO method is to effectively detect and classify weeds and crop. In the proposed AWRC-DLMLO technique, the main phase of Gaussian filtering (GF) utilizing image pre-processing is implemented to eliminate unwanted noise. The plant segmentation was also developed utilizing the Residual Attention U-Net (RA-UNet) for generating segments. The ShuffleNetV2 approach is exploited in the AWRC-DLMLO method to ascertain feature vector. Next, the lemurs optimization algorithm (LOA) is applied to increase the hyperparameter and fine-tune the DL technique, further enhancing its performance. Eventually, the cascading Q-network (CQN)model is employed for the classification process. To emphasize the improved weed detection performance of the projected AWRC-DLMLO method, a wide range of simulations were done. The extensive outcome highlighted the improvements of the developed AWRC-DLMLO technique with other existing models.