Performance evaluation of crop segmentation algorithms

Abstract

This paper presents a thorough evaluation of twenty-one state-of-the-art widely-used crop segmentation algorithms, motived by their significance in vision tasks for further analysis. An ideal crop segmentation algorithm can effectively extract crop information, thus providing an important precondition for the application of intelligent agriculture analytics. In order to enable researchers in this field to fully understand various crop segmentation methods, this paper proposes a new classification strategy of object segmentation by dividing the algorithms into pixel-based and region-based approaches at first, and then systematically evaluating various crop segmentation methods with a unified data benchmark and four common metrics. A new dataset which incorporates crop variety, environment condition and observation distance into consideration is constructed for demonstrating the experiments and comparisons. The effectiveness and robustness of these algorithms were evaluated by three sets of comparative experiments. Based on the quantitative results, we summarize the advantages and disadvantages of the evaluated algorithms from the segmentation performances with four metric indicators. Furthermore, the discussion and evaluation results will provide great support for precision agriculture analysis.