USU-Corn-WeedDB: A UAV RGB Image Dataset for Multi-Species Weed Detection in Forage Corn

Weed pressure in forage corn production causes yield losses of up to 31.5%, yet site-specific weed management (SSWM) systems built on UAV imagery and deep learning remain constrained by the scarcity of field-representative training datasets. We present USU-Corn-WeedDB, a publicly available UAV RGB image dataset collected from a commercial forage corn field in Cache Valley, Utah, designed to support multi-class weed detection under both supervised and semi-supervised learning frameworks. RGB imagery was acquired on 27 June 2025 using an Autel EVO II Dual 640T V2 drone at ~10m above ground level, yielding a ground sampling distance of approximately 0.48 cm/pixel. A total of 366 full-resolution images were tiled into 8,800 patches at 640 x 640-pixel resolution. Of these, 800 images were manually annotated for three weed species; common lambsquarters (Chenopodium album), redroot pigweed (Amaranthus retroflexus), and green foxtail (Setaria viridis) comprising 10,539 bounding-box instances, with the remaining 8,000 tiles retained as an unlabeled pool for semi-supervised experiments. This dataset reflects a natural class imbalance where redroot pigweed constitutes 53.86% of annotated instances, which was preserved intentionally to mirror real field conditions. To validate dataset utility, we trained 28 object detection models spanning five architecture families including YOLOv8, YOLOv9, YOLOv10, YOLO11, YOLO26, and RT-DETR under identical conditions without hyperparameter tuning. Test set mAP@0.5 ranged from 0.773 to 0.840, with lightweight models achieving competitive performance relevant to edge-deployed UAV systems. USU-Corn-WeedDB is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20044178.

Performance Evaluation of Deep Transfer Learning on Multiclass Identification of Common Weed Species in Cotton Production Systems

Precision weed management offers a promising solution for sustainable cropping systems through the use of chemical-reduced/non-chemical robotic weeding techniques, which apply suitable control tactics to individual weeds. Therefore, accurate identification of weed species plays a crucial role in such systems to enable precise, individualized weed treatment. This paper makes a first comprehensive evaluation of deep transfer learning (DTL) for identifying common weeds specific to cotton production systems in southern United States. A new dataset for weed identification was created, consisting of 5187 color images of 15 weed classes collected under natural lighting conditions and at varied weed growth stages, in cotton fields during the 2020 and 2021 field seasons. We evaluated 27 state-of-the-art deep learning models through transfer learning and established an extensive benchmark for the considered weed identification task. DTL achieved high classification accuracy of F1 scores exceeding 95%, requiring reasonably short training time (less than 2.5 hours) across models. ResNet101 achieved the best F1-score of 99.1% whereas 14 out of the 27 models achieved F1 scores exceeding 98.0%. However, the performance on minority weed classes with few training samples was less satisfactory for models trained with a conventional, unweighted cross entropy loss function. To address this issue, a weighted cross entropy loss function was adopted, which achieved substantially improved accuracies for minority weed classes. Furthermore, a deep learning-based cosine similarity metrics was employed to analyze the similarity among weed classes, assisting in the interpretation of classifications. Both the codes for model benchmarking and the weed dataset are made publicly available, which expect to be be a valuable resource for future research in weed identification and beyond.