Active learning for efficient annotation in precision agriculture: a use-case on crop-weed semantic segmentation

Optimizing deep learning models requires large amounts of annotated images, a process that is both time-intensive and costly. Especially for semantic segmentation models in which every pixel must be annotated. A potential strategy to mitigate annotation effort is active learning. Active learning facilitates the identification and selection of the most informative images from a large unlabelled pool. The underlying premise is that these selected images can improve the model's performance faster than random selection to reduce annotation effort. While active learning has demonstrated promising results on benchmark datasets like Cityscapes, its performance in the agricultural domain remains largely unexplored. This study addresses this research gap by conducting a comparative study of three active learning-based acquisition functions: Bayesian Active Learning by Disagreement (BALD), stochastic-based BALD (PowerBALD), and Random. The acquisition functions were tested on two agricultural datasets: Sugarbeet and Corn-Weed, both containing three semantic classes: background, crop and weed. Our results indicated that active learning, especially PowerBALD, yields a higher performance than Random sampling on both datasets. But due to the relatively large standard deviations, the differences observed were minimal; this was partly caused by high image redundancy and imbalanced classes. Specifically, more than 89\% of the pixels belonged to the background class on both datasets. The absence of significant results on both datasets indicates that further research is required for applying active learning on agricultural datasets, especially if they contain a high-class imbalance and redundant images. Recommendations and insights are provided in this paper to potentially resolve such issues.

Group-Conditional Conformal Prediction via Quantile Regression Calibration for Crop and Weed Classification

As deep learning predictive models become an integral part of a large spectrum of precision agricultural systems, a barrier to the adoption of such automated solutions is the lack of user trust in these highly complex, opaque and uncertain models. Indeed, deep neural networks are not equipped with any explicit guarantees that can be used to certify the system's performance, especially in highly varying uncontrolled environments such as the ones typically faced in computer vision for agriculture.Fortunately, certain methods developed in other communities can prove to be important for agricultural applications. This article presents the conformal prediction framework that provides valid statistical guarantees on the predictive performance of any black box prediction machine, with almost no assumptions, applied to the problem of deep visual classification of weeds and crops in real-world conditions. The framework is exposed with a focus on its practical aspects and special attention accorded to the Adaptive Prediction Sets (APS) approach that delivers marginal guarantees on the model's coverage. Marginal results are then shown to be insufficient to guarantee performance on all groups of individuals in the population as characterized by their environmental and pedo-climatic auxiliary data gathered during image acquisition.To tackle this shortcoming, group-conditional conformal approaches are presented: the ''classical'' method that consists of iteratively applying the APS procedure on all groups, and a proposed elegant reformulation and implementation of the procedure using quantile regression on group membership indicators. Empirical results showing the validity of the proposed approach are presented and compared to the marginal APS then discussed.