AI-PUCMDL: artificial intelligence assisted plant counting through unmanned aerial vehicles in India's mountainous...

This work introduces a novel approach to remotely count and monitor potato plants in high-altitude regions of India using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and an artificial intelligence (AI)-based deep learning (DL) network. The proposed methodology involves the use of a self-created AI model called PlantSegNet, which is based on VGG-16 and U-Net architectures, to analyze aerial RGB images captured by a UAV. To evaluate the proposed approach, a self-created dataset of aerial images from different planting blocks is used to train and test the PlantSegNet model. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and validity of the proposed method in challenging environmental conditions. The proposed approach achieves pixel accuracy of 98.65%, a loss of 0.004, an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.95, and an F1-Score of 0.94. Comparing the proposed model with existing models, such as Mask-RCNN and U-NET, demonstrates that PlantSegNet outperforms both models in terms of performance parameters. The proposed methodology provides a reliable solution for remote crop counting in challenging terrain, which can be beneficial for farmers in the Himalayan regions of India. The methods and results presented in this paper offer a promising foundation for the development of advanced decision support systems for planning planting operations.