A novel approach based on deep learning techniques and UAVs to yield assessment of paddy fields

Abstract

Yield assessment is one of the main interests at regional and national levels of agriculture management. The accuracy of the assessment is not highly expected inherently and, moreover, some costly and sophisticated tools (e.g., satellite images) have been usually involved without a careful consideration of their investment. In this paper, a novel approach has been proposed orienting to farmers (especially in Southeastern Asia) who are only affordable for low cost and easy-to-use tools. With this vision, the paper presents an idea to co-operate certain, powerful and modern technologies-deep neural networks (DNNs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-with respect to solving the problem of yield assessment. The imagery of paddy fields acquired by UAVs at low altitudes is then used for training DNNs and assessing the yield of the paddy fields. Four DNN models are applied to figure out the most appropriate one for this approach. To test the applicability of the proposed approach, some experiments are conducted on a dataset which was collected at paddy fields in Tay Ninh province, Vietnam. The yield assessment is not directly predicted from DNNs, instead being achieved by a combination of the classification results and a bush-level yield estimation of agricultural experts in the fields. The paper indicates that the proposed approach is quite potential for precision agriculture, along with some remaining challenges.