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Edge Link Detector Based Weed Classifier

Article · March 2009

DOI: 10.1109/ICDIP.2009.64

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 International Conference on Digital Image Processing
Edge Link Detector Based Weed Classifier
Muhammad Hameed Siddiqi Irshad Ahmad
Department of Computer and Department of Computer and
Information Sciences Information Sciences
Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS
Bandar Seri Iskandar, 31750 Bandar Seri Iskandar, 31750
Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia
siddiqi_icp@yahoo.com iakhalil2003@yahoo.com
Abstract— The identification and classification of weeds are of
major technical and economical importance in the agricultural
industry. To automate these activities, like in shape, color and
texture, weed control system is feasible. The goal of this paper
is to build a real-time, machine vision weed control system that
can detect weed locations. The algorithm is developed to
classify images into broad and narrow class for real-time
selective herbicide application. The developed algorithm based
on Edge Link Detector has been tested on weeds at various
locations, which have shown that the algorithm to be very
effectiveness in weed identification. Further the results show a
very reliable performance on weeds under varying field
conditions. The analysis of the results shows over 93 %
classification accuracy over 240 sample images (broad, narrow
and no or little weeds) with 100 samples from broad weeds, 100
samples from narrow weeds and the remaining 40 from no or
little weeds.
Keywords-component; real-time weed recognition; weed
detection; image processing; Ranodom Transform; image
classifier; weed segmentation.
I. INTRODUCTION
Weed control is a critical farm operation and can
significantly affect crop yield. Herbicides play an important
role in weed control but their use is under criticism due to
perceived excessive use and potentially harmful effects.
Several studies suggest that patch spraying considerably
reduces herbicide use. Manual scouting for patch spraying
consumes considerable resources and is not a feasible option
for most farm operations [24]. Many researchers with varied
success have investigated Patch spraying using remote
sensing and machine vision. Machine vision systems are
suitable for plant scale herbicide application whereas remote
sensing can be employed on plot basis. Both of these
systems essentially require image acquisition and image
processing. Image size ranges in the order of megabytes,
thus processing takes 0.34s to 7s depending on image
resolution, crop and weed type, algorithm used and
hardware configurations [23, 19].
The machine vision based approach uses shape, texture,
color and location based features individually or jointly to
discriminate between weed and crop. The studies report
varied results for these features and their combinations [10].
978-0-7695-3565-4/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE 255
DOI 10.1109/ICDIP.2009.64
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Suziah Bt Sulaiman
Department of Computer and
Information Sciences
Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS
Bandar Seri Iskandar, 31750
Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia
suziah@petronas.com.my
An imaging sensor is a key component of almost any weed
detection and classification system and methods of using
them are various. Individual plant classification has been
successfully demonstrated with either spectral [25] or color
imaging [6]. The spatial resolutions of spectral systems are
typically not adequate for accurate individual plant or leaf
detection. Then again, color-imaging methods with higher
spatial resolution do not offer the important additional
information the spectral data provides [26].
Caltrans sprays roadside plant material with herbicide to
prevent the weeds from becoming a fire hazard during the
summer. The first step in identifying weeds within an
image involves classifying the pixels [22]. The pixels shall
be classified using a point operation. The surrounding
pixels will not bias a pixel’s classification. The purpose of
segmenting the image into plant and background pixels is to
detect the amount of plant material within a specific area
[22]. If the amount of plant material reaches a specific
threshold, that area is targeted for herbicidal spay
application [22]. The spray threshold is limited by the
fraction of background pixels that are misclassified as plant
material. If the spray threshold is set too close to the
background misclassification rate, then herbicide will be
wasted spraying background. Therefore, a larger
misclassification rate limits the smallest plant that can be
detected without targeting the background for spray [22].
A system that could make use of the spatial distribution
information in real-time and apply only the necessary
amounts of herbicide to the weed-infested area would be
much more efficient and minimize environmental damage.
Therefore, a high spatial resolution, real-time weed
infestation detection system seems to be the solution for
site-specific weed management.
II.
RELATED WORK
In agriculture, imaging devices provide useful
information to detect in-field heterogeneities. Depending on
what we want to see (a leaf, a plant) and to allow the
features to be visualized, remote sensors can be embedded
in different vehicles such as tractors, agricultural engines
[2], aircraft [3, 2] or satellites. For sustainable agriculture,
particular attention must be paid to herbicide treatments as
they are the major agricultural pollutants and site-specific
spraying of weeds in crop fields could avoid considerable
 use of herbicides. Consequently, many researchers have
developed different vision systems [5] to highlight weed
plants in crops and to map the weeds in real-time for site-
specific spraying of infested areas [7, 8]. These systems can
be based on optical sensors (photodiodes), which can be
used for the classification/ discrimination between plants
(narrow plants and broad plants) from their reflection
spectra. Their reflectance spectra. The best known are Weed
seeker, and Spray vision [8], however, these systems cannot
discriminate between crop and weeds. More recently [9, 10],
have developed a robot, with two vision systems guided by
crop rows, which aims to mechanically remove weeds in the
inter row. However, this detection method is devoted to
crops sown by drilling methods such as salad or sugar beet
[1]. An off-line approach has been also investigated where
data are acquired in one pass and analyzed at the office. In a
second pass, the weed mapping is used to control an
agricultural engine in the crop field. As an example, [12]
developed a multi-spectral imaging system embedded in a
small aircraft, which over-flew a sunflower field crop. This
discriminated between crop and inter-row weeds with
spatial image processing based on Gabor filtering, which
detected crop rows by their frequency. However, weeds
within the crop row were not recognized.
For weed detection a lot of accurate methods have been
developed, such as wavelet transform to discriminate
between crop and weed in perspective agronomic images,
[13] spectral reflectance of plants with artificial neural
networks [15], such as principal component analysis. Other
researchers have investigated texture features [12] or
biological morphology such as leaf shape recognition [13].
So in real time for the identification/Classification of crop
rows in images, a lot of fast methods have been implemented
[14], some of them are based on Hough Transform [16],
some of them are based on Fourier Transform [17], some are
based on Kalman filtering [18] or linear regression [19]. The
Hough Transform is usually implemented for automatic
guidance in crop fields [20, 21]. Consequently there are now
various vision systems available on autonomous weed
control robots for mechanical weed removal.
The purpose of this paper is to develop an algorithm for
real time that is not an autonomous robot but to investigate a
real time machine vision system. The system contains a CCD
camera mounted in front of the tractor at an angle of 45
degree at a distance of 4 meter long from the earth, which is
used for the classification of two types of weeds (broad and
narrow) by using the proposed image processing technique
Edge Link Detection.
III. OBJECTIVES
Since in practice there are only two types of herbicides
used: for broad leaves weed and narrow leaves weed (grass).
The objective of this paper is to:
• Develop a vision algorithm that can recognize the
absence of weed and differentiate the presence of
broad leaf weed and narrow leaf weed.
• Develop a real time sensor that are capable of
recognizing the presence and type of weeds and
apply their right type of herbicides.
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IV. MATERIALS AND METHOD
A. Hardware Desighn
The concept of the automated sprayer system (shown in
figure 3) includes camera, Central Processing Unit (CPU)
decision box and two dc pumps for spraying. The images
were taken at a distance of 4 meter and at angle of 45 degree
with the ground. Agriculture fields are selected for this type
of study.
The software is developed in Matlab. A Graphical User
Interface (GUI) is developed that shows the Original image,
processed image and the result of the proposed algorithm.
The image resolution was 240 pixel rows by 320 pixel
columns.
B. Methodology
Edge detection is a technique used to reduce the amount
of data and filters out unnecessary information through a
structuring element moving pixel by pixel and to determine
the edges of that image. There are two basic methods, which
are used to determine the edges of the image.
Gradient: The gradient method detects the edges by
looking for the maximum and minimum in the first
derivative of the image. And the operators/Filters used for
this method are Soble Filter, Prewitt Filter, Canny Filter,
Robert Filter, Cross Filter, and Smoothing Filter.
Laplacian: The Laplacian method searches for zero
crossings in the second derivative of the image to find
edges. And the mask used for this method is Marr-Hildreth.
The color (RGB) images are converted to gray scale
images for easy and fast processing. Then the proposed
algorithm (Edge Link Detection) using 3x3 mask is applied
to those gray scale images to reduce the amount of data. For
example ‘A’ is an image and ‘B’ is a 3x3 morphological
mask/filter, that determines the edges of the image ‘A’ using
the structuring element B, as shown in figure 2, the
mathematical equations, which are defined as:
A ⊗ B = A − (A * B)
c
= A Ι (A * B)
{ B } = { B 1 , B 2 , B 3 ....... B n }
A ⊗ { B } = ((...(( A ⊗ B 1 ) ⊗ B 2 )...) ⊗ B n
)
The pseudo-code used for the proposed algorithm is given as
[Image taken by CCD camera]
[CPU receives the image]
[Apply the proposed algorithm and recognize the image]
[Decision box ON or OFF the dc pump according to the
decision of the CPU]
[DC pump will apply the right type of herbicides]
The pseudo-code is shown in the form of a flowchart
shown in Figure 1. First the CCD camera captures the image
and then forwards it to CPU, then the CPU process the image
by using the morphological filter (Structuring element) to
remove the unnecessary information from the image and the
edges are to be find as shown figure 4, and then the edges of
 that image are connected with each other through the Origin of the Morphological filter
proposed algorithm as shown in the image of figure 4 (Edge (Structuring Element)
junction Linking), then CPU takes the decision on the bases Size of the Image 320
of the summation of the pixels of the linked edges, i.e. Edge
junction Linking picture shown in figure. 4. The simple
equation for the summation of the pixels is given as:

M N Broad Images
Sum = (i + j) …………………..(1)
i=0 j=0

240
- Preprocessing steps and then

Size if the Image

- Proposed Algorithm

rows
Narrow Images
Start

Read Color Image Figure. 2. Raster Scanning of Image

Conver
Matlab Code to create lookup Tables:

Gray Scale % set up a look up table T1 to find Junctions.

lut = makelut (@junction, 3);
3x3 Mask junctions = applylut (b, lut);
[rj, cj] = find (junctions);
To reduce the amount of data
% set up a look up table T2 to find Endings.
Edge filter lut = makelut (@ending, 3);
ends = applylut (b, lut);
To remove Unnecessary Information and find the Edge [re, ce] = find (ends);
To test whether the center pixel within a 3x3
Proposed Algorithm neighborhood is a junction / ending in LT1 / LT2, the center
pixel must be set and the number of transitions/crossings
(For Decision See Eqn. 1)

Edge Junction Linking

between 0 and 1 as one traverse the perimeter of the 3x3
region must be 6 or 8 for junction and 2 for ending.
Pixels in the 3x3 region are numbered as follows
Summation of Pixels
1 4 7
2 5 8
3 6 9
If sum < threshold value
Decision

Now the intensities of the resultant image are added and

If sum > threshold value
Sprayer Controller
A Real Time Don’t Spray
Automatic
Spray System
Figure. 1. The concept of a Real-Time Specific Weed Sprayer System
In next step raster-scanning technique is used to detect
and link edge points together into lists of coordinate pairs.
Where an edge junction is encountered the list is terminated
and a separate list is generated for each of the branches as
shown in figure 4. Two lookup tables LT1 & LT2 are created
which store the edge junction and ending points respectively.
compared with the selected threshold value (T) for
classification of weeds into broad and narrow.
V. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Fig.4. Show the classification images of broad and
narrow weeds. These images are processed by the proposed
algorithm (Edge Link Detection). The algorithms gave
reliable accuracy to detect the presence or absence of weed
cover. For areas where weeds are detected, results show over
93% classification accuracy over 240 sample images within
which 100 samples from broad weeds, 100 samples from
narrow weeds and the remaining 40 from no or little weeds.
The percentage of each class as shown in the Table 1

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 TABLE I. RESULTS OF THE WEEDS USING THE PROPOSED
ALGORITHM
Weeds Type Results found correct %
Broad Weeds 92%
Narrow Weeds 95%
No or Little Weeds 100%
In the above table the percentage of each category has
been determined by applying the proposed algorithm upon
the database of 240 images (containing 100 samples of
broad, 100 samples of narrow, 40 samples of no or little
weed), from which we determined the percentage of each
category by adding the pixels of all the processed database of
images containing of 240 images of broad, narrow, and no or
little images. The algorithm takes 320 ms to process an
image.
Figure. 3. The Concept of a Weed Sprayer System
VI. CONCLUSION
A weed detection/classification system is developed and
tested in the lab for selective spraying of weeds using vision
recognition system. In this paper, an algorithm based on
detection and linking of edge point in a morphologically
thinned binary image is developed for weed classification
and recognition. The system shows an effective and reliable
classification of images captured using a video camera.
VII. FUTURE WORK
In this paper weed image, which has one dominant weed
species can be classified reasonably accurate. But the case
of more than one weed classes cannot be accurately
classified. Further research is needed to classify mixed
weeds. One way is to break the image into smaller region.
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With smaller region, there will be less possibility to find
more than one weed classes in this small region. The
algorithm is computationally complex and takes 13 to 20
seconds to process the image of 320 x 240 images. To make
it suitable for real time system the further research is needed
to reduce the processing.
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Broad Weed images Gray Scale Edge Detection Edge Junction Linking

Narrow Weed images Gray Scale Edge Detection Edge Junction Linking

Little Weed images Gray Scale Edge Detection Edge Junction Linking

Figure. 4. Resultant Images of Edge Link Detector Based Weed Classifier

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