Deep Learning for Precision Agriculture: Post-Spraying Evaluation and Deposition Estimation

Precision spraying evaluation requires automation primarily in post-spraying imagery. In this paper we propose an eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) computer vision pipeline to evaluate a precision spraying system post-spraying without the need for traditional agricultural methods. The developed system can semantically segment potential targets such as lettuce, chickweed, and meadowgrass and correctly identify if targets have been sprayed. Furthermore, this pipeline evaluates using a domain-specific Weakly Supervised Deposition Estimation task, allowing for class-specific quantification of spray deposit weights in μL. Estimation of coverage rates of spray deposition in a class-wise manner allows for further understanding of effectiveness of precision spraying systems. Our study evaluates different Class Activation Mapping techniques, namely AblationCAM and ScoreCAM, to determine which is more effective and interpretable for these tasks. In the pipeline, inference-only feature fusion is used to allow for further interpretability and to enable the automation of precision spraying evaluation post-spray. Our findings indicate that a Fully Convolutional Network with an EfficientNet-B0 backbone and inference-only feature fusion achieves an average absolute difference in deposition values of 156.8 μL across three classes in our test set. The dataset curated in this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/Harry-Rogers/PSIE