# Multi-growth stage plant recognition: a case study of Palmer amaranth (Amaranthus palmeri) in cotton (Gossypium hirsutum)

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15816 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15816/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [YOLOv6: A Single-Stage Object Detection Framework for Industrial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02976/) (2022)
- [Perceptual Generative Adversarial Networks for Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05274/) (2017)
- [DeepWeeds: A Multiclass Weed Species Image Dataset for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05726/) (2018)
- [YOLOv6 v3.0: A Full-Scale Reloading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05586/) (2023)
- [Global Wheat Head Detection (GWHD) dataset: a large and diverse dataset of high resolution RGB labelled images to develop and benchmark wheat head detection methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02162/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning Techniques for Weed Detection from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01415/) (2021)
- [Performance Evaluation of Deep Transfer Learning on Multiclass Identification of Common Weed Species in Cotton Production Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04960/) (2021)
- [WheatNet: A Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network for High-throughput Image-based Wheat Head Detection and Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09408/) (2021)
- [Towards practical object detection for weed spraying in precision agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11048/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Semi-Supervised Weed Detection for Rapid Deployment and Enhanced Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07399/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many advanced, image-based precision agricultural technologies for plant breeding, field crop research, and site-specific crop management hinge on the reliable detection and phenotyping of plants across highly variable morphological growth stages. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promise for image-based plant phenotyping and weed recognition, but their ability to recognize growth stages, often with stark differences in appearance, is uncertain. Amaranthus palmeri (Palmer amaranth) is a particularly challenging weed plant in cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) production, exhibiting highly variable plant morphology both across growth stages over a growing season, as well as between plants at a given growth stage due to high genetic diversity. In this paper, we investigate eight-class growth stage recognition of A. palmeri in cotton as a challenging model for You Only Look Once (YOLO) architectures. We compare 26 different architecture variants from YOLO v3, v5, v6, v6 3.0, v7, and v8 on an eight-class growth stage dataset of A. palmeri. The highest mAP@[0.5:0.95] for recognition of all growth stage classes was 47.34% achieved by v8-X, with inter-class confusion across visually similar growth stages. With all growth stages grouped as a single class, performance increased, with a maximum mean average precision (mAP@[0.5:0.95]) of 67.05% achieved by v7-Original. Single class recall of up to 81.42% was achieved by v5-X, and precision of up to 89.72% was achieved by v8-X. Class activation maps (CAM) were used to understand model attention on the complex dataset. Fewer classes, grouped by visual or size features improved performance over the ground-truth eight-class dataset. Successful growth stage detection highlights the substantial opportunity for improving plant phenotyping and weed recognition technologies with open-source object detection architectures.