- Title
- Technology in conservation: towards a system for in-field drone detection of invasive vegetation
- Creator
- James, Katherine Margaret Frances
- Subject
- Drone aircraft in remote sensing
- Subject
- Neural networks (Computer science)
- Subject
- Drone aircraft in remote sensing -- Case studies
- Subject
- Machine learning
- Subject
- Computer vision
- Subject
- Environmental monitoring -- Remote sensing
- Subject
- Invasive plants -- Monitoring
- Date Issued
- 2020
- Date
- 2020
- Type
- text
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MSc
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143408
- Identifier
- vital:38244
- Description
- Remote sensing can assist in monitoring the spread of invasive vegetation. The adoption of camera-carrying unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as drones, as remote sensing tools has yielded images of higher spatial resolution than traditional techniques. Drones also have the potential to interact with the environment through the delivery of bio-control or herbicide, as seen with their adoption in precision agriculture. Unlike in agricultural applications, however, invasive plants do not have a predictable position relative to each other within the environment. To facilitate the adoption of drones as an environmental monitoring and management tool, drones need to be able to intelligently distinguish between invasive and non-invasive vegetation on the fly. In this thesis, we present the augmentation of a commercially available drone with a deep machine learning model to investigate the viability of differentiating between an invasive shrub and other vegetation. As a case study, this was applied to the shrub genus Hakea, originating in Australia and invasive in several countries including South Africa. However, for this research, the methodology is important, rather than the chosen target plant. A dataset was collected using the available drone and manually annotated to facilitate the supervised training of the model. Two approaches were explored, namely, classification and semantic segmentation. For each of these, several models were trained and evaluated to find the optimal one. The chosen model was then interfaced with the drone via an Android application on a mobile device and its performance was preliminarily evaluated in the field. Based on these findings, refinements were made and thereafter a thorough field evaluation was performed to determine the best conditions for model operation. Results from the classification task show that deep learning models are capable of distinguishing between target and other shrubs in ideal candidate windows. However, classification in this manner is restricted by the proposal of such candidate windows. End-to-end image segmentation using deep learning overcomes this problem, classifying the image in a pixel-wise manner. Furthermore, the use of appropriate loss functions was found to improve model performance. Field tests show that illumination and shadow pose challenges to the model, but that good recall can be achieved when the conditions are ideal. False positive detection remains an issue that could be improved. This approach shows the potential for drones as an environmental monitoring and management tool when coupled with deep machine learning techniques and outlines potential problems that may be encountered.
- Format
- 189 pages
- Format
- Publisher
- Rhodes University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Science, Computer Science
- Language
- English
- Rights
- James, Katherine Margaret Frances
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | JAMES-MSC-TR207.pdf | 23 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |