Sensing for Weed Detection

Conventional weed control methods are based on uniform treatments of the whole field, however, weeds are not distributed uniformly within fields, which means that the uniform distribution of herbicides is inappropriate. Considerable research has been conducted on different aspects of site-specific weed management in the past three decades from fundamental studies on the spatial distribution of weeds to the applied development and testing of new technologies for weed detection and site-specific control. Despite the available technologies and knowledge, there has been little practical adoption of these technologies mainly due to the lack of automated weed detection methods. However, significant progress has been made in the past few years. This chapter describes the general principles of automated weed detection and how these principles can be used in an agricultural context. Two cases demonstrate the progress of spot-application of herbicides based on automated weed detection using RGB cameras mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and ground vehicles.