Water hyacinth detection for autonomous navigation mapping using image segmentation cascaded classifier

Water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) is among the world's most aggressive invasive aquatic weeds. Its rapid proliferation forms thick floating mats that block sunlight, deplete dissolved oxygen, impede navigation, degrade water quality, and severely threaten aquatic biodiversity and livelihoods, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions. We present a low-cost, fully autonomous catamaran system designed for targeted detection and mechanical removal of floating water hyacinth in small-to-medium water bodies. The perception pipeline combines two deep-learning models deployed on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano. First, a UNet architecture performs pixel-level segmentation of aquatic vegetation from real-time RGB images (mean Dice coefficient 0.906 ± 0.04, mean IoU 0.831 ± 0.06, evaluated on a custom dataset of 7282 real-world image-mask pairs collected from moving platforms under varied lighting and water conditions). The resulting mask is then fed to a fine-tuned VGG19 classifier that discriminates water hyacinth from other vegetation and floating debris with 96% accuracy, precision 0.97, recall 0.95, and F1-score 0.96. Detection results are mapped to four image quadrants, triggering simple yet robust rudder commands that reliably centre patches in the field of view. The 75 cm twin-hull vessel, 3D-printed from Polyethylene Terephthalate Glycol (PETG), is propelled by twin brushless DC motors and carries a passive rear conveyor-belt collector that scoops and stores up to 25 kg of wet biomass. Field trials conducted in natural ponds and canals in Chennai, India, confirmed stable real-time performance, effective quadrant-based navigation, and successful autonomous collection across diverse weather conditions. This affordable, open-design solution offers immediate deployability and straightforward scalability through fleet operation, directly supporting UN Sustainable Development Goals 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) and 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure).