# Weed Recognition using Deep Learning Techniques on Class-imbalanced Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07819 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07819/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [SpotTune: Transfer Learning through Adaptive Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08737/) (2018)
- [Cost Sensitive Learning of Deep Feature Representations from Imbalanced Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.03422/) (2015)
- [Deep learning in agriculture: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11809/) (2018)
- [DeepWeeds: A Multiclass Weed Species Image Dataset for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05726/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning Techniques for Weed Detection from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01415/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning Fundus Image Analysis for Diabetic Retinopathy and Macular Edema Grading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08764/) (2019)
- [Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Plant Seedlings Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08404/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most weed species can adversely impact agricultural productivity by competing for nutrients required by high-value crops. Manual weeding is not practical for large cropping areas. Many studies have been undertaken to develop automatic weed management systems for agricultural crops. In this process, one of the major tasks is to recognise the weeds from images. However, weed recognition is a challenging task. It is because weed and crop plants can be similar in colour, texture and shape which can be exacerbated further by the imaging conditions, geographic or weather conditions when the images are recorded. Advanced machine learning techniques can be used to recognise weeds from imagery. In this paper, we have investigated five state-of-the-art deep neural networks, namely VGG16, ResNet-50, Inception-V3, Inception-ResNet-v2 and MobileNetV2, and evaluated their performance for weed recognition. We have used several experimental settings and multiple dataset combinations. In particular, we constructed a large weed-crop dataset by combining several smaller datasets, mitigating class imbalance by data augmentation, and using this dataset in benchmarking the deep neural networks. We investigated the use of transfer learning techniques by preserving the pre-trained weights for extracting the features and fine-tuning them using the images of crop and weed datasets. We found that VGG16 performed better than others on small-scale datasets, while ResNet-50 performed better than other deep networks on the large combined dataset.