Segmentation and Proportion Extraction of Crop, Crop Residues, and Soil Using Digital Images and Deep Learning

Abstract

Conservation tillage involves covering the soil surface with crop residues after harvest, typically through reduced or no-tillage practices. This approach increases the soil organic matter, improves the soil structure, prevents erosion, reduces water loss, promotes microbial activity, and enhances root development. Therefore, accurate information on crop residue coverage is critical for monitoring the implementation of conservation tillage practices. This study collected “crop–crop residues–soil” images from wheat-soybean rotation fields using mobile phones to create calibration, validation, and independent validation datasets. We developed a deep learning model named crop–crop residue–soil segmentation network (CCRSNet) to enhance the performance of cropland “crop–crop residues–soil” image segmentation and proportion extraction. The model enhances the segmentation accuracy and proportion extraction by extracting and integrating shallow and deep image features and attention modules to capture multi-scale contextual information. Our findings indicated that (1) lightweight models outperformed deeper networks for “crop–crop residues–soil” image segmentation. When CCRSNet employed a deep network backbone (ResNet50), its feature extraction capability was inferior to that of lighter models (VGG16). (2) CCRSNet models that integrated shallow and deep features with attention modules achieved a high segmentation and proportion extraction performance. Using VGG16 as the backbone, CCRSNet achieved an mIoU of 92.73% and a PA of 96.23% in the independent validation dataset, surpassing traditional SVM and RF models. The RMSE for the proportion extraction accuracy ranged from 1.05% to 3.56%. These results demonstrate the potential of CCRSNet for the accurate, rapid, and low-cost detection of crop residue coverage. However, the generalizability and robustness of deep learning models depend on the diversity of calibration datasets. Further experiments across different regions and crops are required to validate this method’s accuracy and applicability for “crop–crop residues–soil” image segmentation and proportion extraction.