Utilizing unsupervised learning to improve sward content prediction and herbage mass estimation

Sward species composition estimation is a tedious one. Herbage must be collected in the field, manually separated into components, dried and weighed to estimate species composition. Deep learning approaches using neural networks have been used in previous work to propose faster and more cost efficient alternatives to this process by estimating the biomass information from a picture of an area of pasture alone. Deep learning approaches have, however, struggled to generalize to distant geographical locations and necessitated further data collection to retrain and perform optimally in different climates. In this work, we enhance the deep learning solution by reducing the need for ground-truthed (GT) images when training the neural network. We demonstrate how unsupervised contrastive learning can be used in the sward composition prediction problem and compare with the state-of-the-art on the publicly available GrassClover dataset collected in Denmark as well as a more recent dataset from Ireland where we tackle herbage mass and height estimation.