Real-time Weed Identification Using Machine Learning and Image Processing in Oil Palm Plantations

Abstract

The effectiveness and efficiency of the operation of oil palm plantations are considered to be the most crucial factor to develop the productivity and profitability of the palm oil business. One of the major obstacles for the plants to optimally produce crops based on their capacity is caused by the presence of noxious weeds in the plantation area. However, weed control via chemical processes may potentially harm the surrounding environment if it is not properly managed. Therefore, an automatic system to assist the farmers to identify and control the weeds is required to minimize harmful impacts on the environment. Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based systems provide powerful tools to perform such tasks. In this work, we aim for an ML-based system design to perform an automatic weed recognition task. The methodology can provide an effort for environmental sustainability in oil palm plantations. The weed identification involves the description, the local names, and tolerance class of the weeds as well as suggestions to control them. The flow of this work consists of weed and herbicide data acquisition, data labeling, model configurations, and data training. Further, the proposed system can be adopted as an android-based application in mobile devices that can deploy the trained model to predict weed category in both real-time and non-real-time tasks.