Deep learning can tell the difference between white and blue lupins

AHRI Snapshots

Blue lupins are notorious for being difficult to control and plants produce prolific seed banks.
Blue lupins are closely related to the domesticated narrow-leaf lupin, also known as the white lupin, so whichever herbicide is survived by white lupins is also survived by blue lupins. This is problematic as they look alike.

This is where a team of researchers from AHRI and the Centre for Applied Bioinformatics at the University of Western Australia, led by UWA PhD candidate and Forrest Research Scholar, Monica Danilevicz comes in.
The team has recently taken the approach of using weed labelling and deep learning algorithms to see if they can distinguish between the two lupin species in images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles, known as UAVs, like drones, or ground-based cameras.

The aim is to detect and spray just the blue lupins in crop. Monica explains the results further in this chat.
Links

• Paper: Segmentation of Sandplain Lupin Weeds from Morphologically Similar Narrow-Leafed Lupins in the Field
• Code repository
• Image repository
• Centre for Applied Bioinformatics
• Follow Monica on Twitter here
• Github
• You can also read more about the research in the AHRI insight here

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