Soybean Yield Preharvest Prediction Based on Bean Pods and Leaves Image Recognition Using Deep Learning Neural...

Soybean yield is a highly complex trait determined by multiple factors such as genotype, environment, and their interactions. The earlier the prediction during the growing season the better. Accurate soybean yield prediction is important for germplasm innovation and planting environment factor improvement. But until now, soybean yield has been determined by weight measurement manually after soybean plant harvest which is time-consuming, has high cost and low precision. This paper proposed a soybean yield in-field prediction method based on bean pods and leaves image recognition using a deep learning algorithm combined with a generalized regression neural network (GRNN). A faster region-convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN), feature pyramid network (FPN), single shot multibox detector (SSD), and You Only Look Once (YOLOv3) were employed for bean pods recognition in which recognition precision and speed were 86.2, 89.8, 80.1, 87.4%, and 13 frames per second (FPS), 7 FPS, 24 FPS, and 39 FPS, respectively. Therefore, YOLOv3 was selected considering both recognition precision and speed. For enhancing detection performance, YOLOv3 was improved by changing IoU loss function, using the anchor frame clustering algorithm, and utilizing the partial neural network structure with which recognition precision increased to 90.3%. In order to improve soybean yield prediction precision, leaves were identified and counted, moreover, pods were further classified as single, double, treble, four, and five seeds types by improved YOLOv3 because each type seed weight varies. In addition, soybean seed number prediction models of each soybean planter were built using PLSR, BP, and GRNN with the input of different type pod numbers and leaf numbers with which prediction results were 96.24, 96.97, and 97.5%, respectively. Finally, the soybean yield of each planter was obtained by accumulating the weight of all soybean pod types and the average accuracy was up to 97.43%. The results show that it is feasible to predict the soybean yield of plants in situ with high precision by fusing the number of leaves and different type soybean pods recognized by a deep neural network combined with GRNN which can speed up germplasm innovation and planting environmental factor optimization.