Agriculture-vision: A large aerial image database for agricultural pattern analysis

The success of deep learning in visual recognition tasks has driven advancements in multiple fields of research. Particularly, increasing attention has been drawn towards its application in agriculture. Nevertheless, while visual pattern recognition on farmlands carries enormous economic values, little progress has been made to merge computer vision and crop sciences due to the lack of suitable agricultural image datasets. Meanwhile, problems in agriculture also pose new challenges in computer vision. For example, semantic segmentation of aerial farmland images requires inference over extremely large-size images with extreme annotation sparsity. These challenges are not present in most of the common object datasets, and we show that they are more challenging than many other aerial image datasets. In this thesis, we present a pilot study in computer vision for agriculture, specifically semantic segmentation of agricultural patterns. We collected $94,986$ high-quality aerial images from $3,432$ farmlands across the US, where each image consists of Red-Green-Blue (RGB) and Near-infrared (NIR) channels with resolutions as high as 10 cm per pixel. We annotate nine types of field anomaly patterns that are most important to farmers. As a pilot study of aerial agricultural semantic segmentation, we perform comprehensive experiments using popular semantic segmentation models; we also propose an effective model designed for aerial agricultural pattern recognition. Our experiments demonstrate several challenges of vision and agriculture.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical & Computer Engr

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Chiu, Mang Tik

Contributors dc:contributor

• Shi, Humphrey

• vision
• agriculture
• segmentation
• aerial image

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Mang Tik Chiu

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117694

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F117694