Applicability of Artificial Neural Network for Automatic Crop Type Classification on UAV-Based Images

Recent advances in optical remote sensing, especially with the development of machine learning models have made it possible to automatically classify different crop types based on their unique spectral characteristics. In this article, a simple feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN) was implemented for the automatic classification of various crop types. A DJI Mavic air drone was used to simultaneously collect about 549 images of a mixed-crop farmland belonging to Federal University of Technology Minna, Nigeria. The images were annotated and the ANN algorithm was implemented using custom-designed Python programming scripts with libraries such as NumPy, Label box, and Segmentation Mask, for the classification. The algorithm was designed to automatically classify maize, rice, soya beans, groundnut, yam and a non-crop feature into different land spectral classes. The model training performance, using 70% of the dataset, shows that the loss curve flattened down with minimal over-fitting, showing that the model was improving as it trained. Finally, the accuracy of the automatic crop-type classification was evaluated with the aid of the recorded loss function and confusion matrix, and the result shows that the implemented ANN gave an overall training classification accuracy of 87.7% from the model and an overall accuracy of 0.9393 as computed from the confusion matrix, which attests to the robustness of ANN when implemented on high-resolution image data for automatic classification of crop types in a mixed farmland. The overall accuracy, including the user accuracy, proved that only a few images were incorrectly classified, which demonstrated that the errors of omission and commission were minimal.