Abstract

Apparently weed is a major menace in crop production as it competes with crop for nutrients, moisture, space and light which resulting in poor growth and development of the crop and finally yield. Yield loss accounts for even more than 70% when crops are frown under unweeded condition with severe weed infestation. Weed management is the most significant process in the agricultural applications to improve the crop productivity rate and reduce the herbicide application cost. Existing weed detection techniques does not yield better performance due to the complex background, illumination variation and crop and weed overlapping in the agricultural field image. Hence, there arises a need for the development of effective weed identification technique. To overcome this drawback, this paper proposes a novel Wrapping Curvelet Transformation Based Angular Texture Pattern Extraction Method (WCTATP) for weed identification. In our proposed work, Global Histogram Equalization (GHE) is used improve the quality of the image and Adaptive Median Filter (AMF) is used for filtering the impulse noise from the image. Plant image identification is performed using green pixel extraction and k-means clustering. Wrapping Curvelet transform is applied to the plant image. Feature extraction is performed to extract the angular texture pattern of the plant image. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based Differential Evolution Feature Selection (DEFS) approach is applied to select the optimal features. Then, the selected features are learned and passed through an RVM based classifier to find out the weed. Edge detection and contouring is performed to identify the weed in the plant image. The Fuzzy rule-based approach is applied to detect the low, medium and high levels of the weed patchiness. From the experimental results, it is clearly observed that the accuracy of the proposed approach is higher than the existing Support Vector Machine (SVM) based approaches. The proposed approach achieves better performance in terms of accuracy.