Towards Semantic Scene Segmentation for Autonomous Agricultural Vehicles

The development of autonomous agricultural vehicles depends on accurate visual interpretation of the environment. Semantic pixel-wise segmentation plays an important role in achieving a more detailed description of the scene and understanding of the spatial-relationship between different objects. In this paper, a deep architecture for road scene and indoor scene segmentation, SegNet, is applied in solving the scene recognition problem for the agricultural environment. The network is trained on an agriculture image dataset collected during field operation. The problem focuses on the segmentation of five classes of structures commonly found in the fields: vegetation, grass, ground, crop field and obstacles. We apply frequency balancing to address the challenge of class imbalance and transfer learning technique. The quantitative performance of the network is evaluated using pixel accuracy and intersection over union metrics. Moreover, we present an approach for an infield qualitative validation of the trained network.